Generational Divide

American Demographics, Oct, 2000

As a decade, the 1970s stand out in Americans' minds for many reasons: Nixon's resignation, disco, the big blackout, bell- bottoms. But for Jonathan Pontell - then a teenager - the defining moment of the decade came in the classroom. His high school teacher, a full 15 years older than him, broke the news: She was from the same generation as all of the students dutifully sitting at their desks.

"The whole class just burst out laughing," recalls Pontell, now a sociologist and author. "It was just so obvious that we were not Baby Boomers. We were not the same as people of her age." (Baby Boomers, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, were born between 1946 and 1964, years when the number of births was substantially higher than in years before or immediately after.)

The memory lingered, and when the media began covering a new generation in the 1980s - a post-Baby Boom generation - Pontell's ears perked up. But by then the spotlight was now firmly fixed on Generation X - younger, more cynical than Pontell and his age mates. History had skipped "his" generation, he says. So he decided to write a book highlighting this forgotten group: Those too young to be Baby Boomers, yet too old to be Gen Xers. Says Pontell: "It's not too late for this generation to be found."

This month, Pontell's book, devoted to this "lost" generation hits bookstores. His conclusion: Baby Boomers should be defined as those born between 1942 and 1953. Those born between 1954 and 1965 should fall into a new group, which he calls Generation Jones. (Gen X, by his calculations, falls between 1966 and 1978.) The author has spent the last four years researching Generation Jones, poring over data from the Census Bureau and other sources, and analyzing hundreds of movies, television shows, and other cultural artifacts from his formative years. He's even lined up a list of celebrity testimonials. Talk show host Rosie O'Donnell, comedian Drew Carey, and actress Maureen McCormick are among the celebs who represent the face of Generation Jones.

Certainly, Pontell is not the first to point out that the traditional definition of the Baby Boom is too wide. Many researchers have noted that early Boomers - people born during the first half of the Baby Boom's 18-year span - and later Boomers, are different in many ways. But where Pontell breaks with conventional demographic thinking is in his belief that the differences that exist among Boomers are enough to warrant the declaration of a whole new generation.

More importantly, there's the issue of how Pontell groups Boomers and Xers; his reasoning has nothing to do with birth data previously used to define these generations. In fact, Pontell says that defining generations around the number of births in a given year is "a widely discredited theory" - nevermind that it's a widely-used method within leading demography circles. More than just a question of semantics, the discussion of Generation Jones opens up a wider debate: What defines a generation? Are traditional ways of looking at generation still meaningful in a diverse and ever-changing world? And what does it all mean for marketers who seek a deeper understanding of consumers?

A GENERATION DEFINED Among Webster's definitions of generation is the following: "a category of people born and living contemporaneously." Marketers have often defined "generation" as a group of people who share the same formative experiences. These experiences bind people that are born in continuous years into "cohorts" - a group of individuals that have a demographic statistic in common. Most frequently, demographers use birth year as that common statistic, explains Mark Mather, an analyst at the Population Research Group, a demographic think tank in Washington D.C. "Demographers like to package things in a way that's easy to measure, and date of birth is the easiest way to define generations," he says. Birth dates don't change as income, geographic region, or marital status do, and relying on birth dates makes it easier to track a group of people over time.

During the 20th century, the number of babies born in a given year has fluctuated dramatically, explains Louis Pol, demographer and associate dean at the College of Business Administration at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. In the early 1900s, the number of babies born each year was relatively stable. The number of births fell during the Great Depression, and the major wars of the century also pushed the number of births down, as would-be fathers were out of the country. But when the GIs returned, birthrates rebounded. With these dips and surges, the shape of the World War II generation (born 1909 to 1932) and the Swing Generation (born 1933 to 1945) was formed.

After World War II, America was in the mood to procreate. Between 1946 and 1964, roughly 76 million babies were born, and each year there were more babies born than in the year before. After 1964, this trend reversed - hence the Baby Bust, or Generation X. In 1977, many Boomer women decided to have children, and the birthrate began to climb steadily - creating an "Echo-Boom," or Generation Y.