By Ashoke Agarrwal
The concept of generations as a social class began as most social ideas do in literature. Gertrude Stein coined the phrase “The Lost Generation” as a signifier of the age cohort that, in early adulthood, experienced World War I and their “directionless, disoriented, wandering” spirit after the war.
In 1928, Karl Mannheim posited a theory of generations in his German essay – “Das Problem der Generationen”, translated into English only in 1952.
The theory of generation entered advertising in the 1960s and 70s with the practice of market and consumer segmentation and entered product development and marketing communication. Over the subsequent decades, generational marketing became a foundational marketing practice in the US.
In time, the practice of marketing defined a generation as “a cohort of people born within a similar span of time (15 years at the upper end) who share a comparable age and life stage and who are shaped by a particular span of time (events, trends and developments).
With advances in travel and communications, a global culture began to develop among the affluent and educated classes. Over the past few decades, as the globalisation of consumer culture has strengthened, marketers across the globe have been using a global generational segmentation framework:
• Baby Boomers born between 1946 – 1964
• Generation X 1965-1976
• Millennial 1977-1998
• Generation Z 1996 -2010
Generations as a market segment become relevant as the cohort ages to become decision-makers in the consumer market.
The generational segmentation framework, as stated above, is most relevant among the developed Western countries because of a commonality in the dominant culture and a common social, political and economic history. In other countries, there have been attempts to define a more relevant framework. However, these attempts have been sporadic in India. Indian brands and advertising planning set-ups have, by and large, stuck to the global framework.
Arun Jagannathan sets out an example of a generational framework custom-designed for India in his LinkedIn blog post:
• Die-hards (born before 1960)
• Conventionalists (1961-1980)
• Progressives (1980 -2000)
• After Google (after 2000)
Is generational segmentation relevant among emerging trends in media and lifestyles in the post-post-modern age?
The last few decades of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of Big Culture and its handmaiden Big Media. As a result, the same cultural artefacts – the same pop music, the same mainstream films, the same celebrities, and the same fashion trends – influenced entire age cohorts. And it made imminent marketing sense to treat these age cohorts as a viable market and create and market products, brand positionings and advertising to target these segments. Beyond culture, in the last decades of the twentieth century, the impact of major political and economic events was governed by the individual’s stage of life and, therefore, relatively homogenous across age cohorts.
Come the twenty-first century, Big Culture and Big Media have dissolved into myriad streams that allow an individual to live in ever smaller echo chambers. Further, the impact of these echo chambers, in most cases, outweighs the effect of demographic variables. For example, in the eighties and the nineties, an individual’s political affiliation was very weakly, if at all, predictive of his lifestyle. Today political affiliation in most democracies worldwide is strongly predictive of cultural and attitudinal values.
It is, therefore, important for marketers to use generational segmentation in combination with other segmentation frameworks.
One such framework would be Psychographics. Psychographic segmentation is a much-debated tool among marketers but less intensely used for various reasons. However, with the arrival of the second digital marketing revolution powered by AI, psychographic segmentation will finally come into its own. And well-researched frameworks like Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and VALS types will be among the most used in marketing. Psychographic segmentation and emerging directions of its use in marketing is a deep and interesting topic that I hope to explore in future columns.
Besides using Generational Segmentation in combination with Psychographics, I would also recommend using these frameworks in conjunction with the increasingly important social construct – Tribes.
Tribes are segments based on beliefs, affinities and interests. In today’s politically charged atmosphere, it perhaps is the most effective we start with tribal segmentation before overlaying Psychographic and Generational segmentation.
A “whine-and-cheese” liberal, extroverted Millennial and a “bhakt” conservative, extroverted Millennial are like chalk-to-cheese.
The post-post-modern world offers an ever-increasing ability to target multi-dimensional segmentation. Therefore, marketers must fine-tune mass-media era Demographics-based segmentation with modern-day Psychographics and Tribal affinities.
After all, segmentation, like politics, is the art of the possible.