Gen when? We shouldn’t be put in a box until we’re dead
Labels can be helpful, but has the marketing industry relied too much on the homogenous definition of people? Paul Domenet, Creative Strategic Director at Free The Birds, believes so, saying that advertising's reliance on generational distinctions is doing more harm that good.
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Everyone who has decided to press on despite the headline and read this has one thing in common: You are all alive at the same time.
You all share the fact that you are fellow passengers on the planet right now. But, despite this wonderful and natural common bond, there are many who seek to divide us. Especially at this current point in our history. One of those groups of people is the marketing industry, and the way they want to separate us is based purely on when we were born.
If you lived at a particular time in the Middle Ages, I doubt anyone would have referred to you as ‘Gen Plague’.
A few sentences ago you were all one, but now you are now starting to split off into Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z, Millennials, Boomers (I’m not sure Gen Alpha will be reading this kind of thing yet, but let’s not pre-judge).
Above: The number of candles on your birthday cake shouldn't define the person you are.
When did all this ‘Gen' stuff start?
If you lived at a particular time in the Middle Ages, I doubt anyone would have referred to you as ‘Gen Plague’, but now you have to be allotted your own personal era. Except that it’s not personal. You are supposed to share all manner of traits with those in a defined period. That’s where you belong. That is YOUR space in time.
Now you have to be allotted your own personal era. Except that it’s not personal.
Along with this comes many pre-assigned likes and dislikes; the music you like, the colours you like (millennial pink and gen alpha yellow, anyone?!), your views on everything from home-owning to relationships to education to food to drink. The number of candles on your birthday cake tells us how you use technology and how you dress, and there are very strict parameters.
In case you don’t know where you belong, let me remind you.
- Boomers [1946 – 1964]
- Gen X [1965 – 1980]
- Millenials (Gen Y) [1981 – 1996]
- Gen Z [1997 – 2012]
- Gen Alpha [2010 – 2024]
- Gen Beta [2025 – 2039]
Above: Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X continued the generational divide after the coining of Baby Boomers in the 1960s.
Whose bright idea was this?
Why did someone feel the need to fence us all off into our age-related enclosures? As we did with agriculture back in the day, we collectively felt a need to impose lines on everything that is natural, including birth.
To begin with, the classification was more poetic. The Lost Generation, coined by Gertrude Stein, described those who came of age during the First World War, and therefore is very specific. Then, in a Time magazine essay of 1951, we saw the arrival of the phrase the Silent Generation who were born roughly (note ‘roughly,’) between 1928 and 1945 and were apparently more cautious and conforming than their predecessors.
The process properly started motoring when the phrase ‘Baby Boomer’ appeared in print for the first time in 1963.
However, the process properly started motoring when the phrase ‘Baby Boomer’ appeared in print for the first time in 1963, due to the large rise in births following the second World War. Fair enough. Nice alliteration. We could have left it there but no, Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel ‘Generation X’ captured the comparative loss of identity (apparently) of those who followed the dominant Boomers.
And then we were off.
‘Gen Y’ can be credited to the publication Advertising Age in 1993 (I told you the marketing industry’s mucky hands are all over this). Yes, the marketers had discovered the tail-end of the alphabet and they were going to milk it. It was just so very handy for the increasingly research-influenced industry.
But hold on, we’re hurtling towards Z. What do we do then? We can’t let this die! Then someone had a great idea. Steal the old method used by the Vehicle Licensing people in Swansea. They used letters at the end of number plates to allocate when a car was made. The marketers swooped but, fuelled by self-aggrandisation, they had the genius notion to switch to Greek. A bit of Greek will give the process gravitas and weight. That means it’s official.
Welcome Gen Alpha and Gen Beta (looking forward to Gen Epsilon).
Above: "Someone whose childhood involved three television channels and a landline has experienced a different world from someone who has never known life without a smartphone"; but observation should not mean definition.
It’s all Greek to me
Some of us feel comfort in our boxes. We are pattern-seeking creatures after all, and generations give us a convenient way to make sense of millions of people at once. Also, there is clearly some truth in the idea that the world you grow up in leaves its mark. Someone whose childhood involved three television channels and a landline has experienced a different world from someone who has never known life without a smartphone.
The problem comes when an observation becomes a definition. It’s lazy for a useful shorthand to start doing the job of actually understanding people.
The problem comes when an observation becomes a definition. It’s lazy for a useful shorthand to start doing the job of actually understanding people. A shared experience might influence us, but it doesn’t necessarily determine our tastes, values, ambitions or behaviour.
And the more confidently we draw those generational lines, the easier it becomes to forget just how much variation exists within them.
How accurate are the definitions?
Undoubtedly, the years spent growing up and developing as a human being shape your world view. The events you witness together shape your outlook to a certain extent. But can you really tell me that someone born in 1980 should be viewed through a different lens as someone born in 1981? One is are X. One is Y. Stay in your lane.
It is a universal insult to humanity, and it seems that we have all accepted it blindly. Largely, it appears, to suit journalists and people writing briefs for design and communications agencies, but it completely ignores the possibility that people are individuals.
That you can like loud colours and not be in Gen Z. That you can like The Beatles and not be a Boomer. That you can be excited by what AI can do even if you were born before mobile phones were even a thing.
Above: "Rebellion isn't the exclusive property of youth."
I would like to tear these divisions, and others, up but I realise that is not possible. They are here to stay. We will continue to be classified by the exact minute we arrive on Earth, and the marketers will continue to scroll through the alphabet drawing more lines in the sand as future humans follow in our footsteps.
Why?
Because to embrace the truth, that we are all different and we are all capable of having our own thoughts about the world as we pass through it, would be too hard to fit neatly into a strategy. It would require having to create ideas which can capture the attention and imagination of people who have a certain attitude to life regardless of what the dates on their passport say.
Rebellion isn’t the exclusive property of youth. Optimism, ambition, nostalgia, individuality and the desire to belong don’t arrive or disappear according to a generational timetable.
When people do set out to do that, they can touch nerves and tap into truths rather than tick boxes. Perhaps that’s where our thinking needs to evolve which is why, at Free The Birds, we’re more interested in what sits underneath them.
Attitudes, motivations and archetypes can connect people, regardless of age, because curiosity doesn’t stop. Rebellion isn’t the exclusive property of youth. Optimism, ambition, nostalgia, individuality and the desire to belong don’t arrive or disappear according to a generational timetable.
Maybe the next step isn’t to abandon generations, but to stop allowing them to define the people within them. To move from when someone was born to what moves them.
Because the most powerful ideas don’t speak to a generation, they speak to people.
Now, I think it’s time for me to get back into my box.
