Same
We are, as Phillip Jackson (Rightpoint/Future Commerce) meme’d yesterday, in the heart of “trends report” season. (We found this tweet especially funny, since Phil, himself, produces a trend report.)
Earlier this week, we got two of note: Instagram’s first trends report—focused on Gen Z—and a follow-on Consumer Trends report from Dan Frommer at The New Consumer and Coefficient Capital.
For our money, the report put together by Frommer and Coefficient Capital is only rivaled by the slide decks put together by Benedict Evans, who also released a new report this month.
As is usually the case with these reports, though, the latest Consumer Trends report features a few slides on shifts in sentiments and behaviors among generations: How Gen Z is different from Millennials, Millennials from Gen X, and so on.
These types of slides are worth looking at differently.
While headlines might tell you that millennials want to “feel closer to brands” than other generations, the reality is that generations are more alike than they are different.
Zoom in on the example referenced above (slide 26), and you’ll see that headline is accurate, but also misleading. Roughly half of all Gen Z, Millennials and Gen X state they want to “feel personally close to the brands I buy.” It’s just that Millennials answer that way a little more frequently.
To pose the skeptic’s question: So what?
In marketing, we often overcomplicate our jobs by creating segments of customers that aren’t really all that different from others.
Doing so doesn’t just create more work, it creates a lack of understanding around how to best get people’s attention.
In October of last year, after longtime Pepsi CEO Donald Kendall died, The Economist published an article about the “cola wars.” In it, they included a chart that shows Coca-Cola’s share of the soft drink market has increased steadily (and still is) since the 1970s.
While we don’t work at Coke, it doesn’t appear they’ve done this by worrying about minor differences among consumers. Instead, they’ve dominated distribution (always have) and created advertising that resonates across audiences.
If anything, it’s harder to do that than to create a bunch of hyper-targeted campaigns for smaller portions of the market. And it certainly appears to be more impactful.
Perhaps, if anything, slides on differences should be a reminder that we’re mostly the same.