Getting Inside Gen Y - Generation Y - Statistical Data Included

American Demographics, Sept 1, 2001

A chain e-mail has been spreading like wildfire among bewildered Baby Boomers. "Can you believe this?" the subject heading reads. "Just in case you weren't feeling too old today..." What follows are some facts about today's college freshman class. Among them:

They do not remember the Cold War and have never feared nuclear war.

The expression "You sound like a broken record" means nothing to them.

There's no such thing as a busy signal or no answer at all.

Baby Boomers aren't the only ones struggling to get their collective minds around Generation Y. Companies across the country are trying to understand this next big consumer market: the 71 million children of Baby Boomers who are now beginning to come of age.

Gen Y, also known as Echo Boomers, has been heralded as the next big generation, an enormously powerful group that has the sheer numbers to transform every life stage it enters - just as its parents generation did. Already, even before all the members of this generation have reached adulthood, businesses in nearly every consumer spending category are jockeying for a piece of this market. But with a generation so complex and huge, how can a company communicate effectively with all its members? Will businesses need to market differently to the youngest members of Gen Y than the oldest, considering that this group spans 17 years?

After all, Gen Y's parents, the nation's 78 million Baby Boomers, have proved that the umbrella definition of a generation doesn't always makes sense, says J. Walker Smith, president of Yankelovich, a research firm based in Norwalk, Conn. In a report last year, the company argued that the most effective way to reach Boomers was to separate them into three segments. Yankelovich classified Boomers into three subgroups: Leading Edge (those born between 1946 and 1950), Core (born between 1951 and 1959) and Trailing Boomers (born between 1960 and 1964).

By studying birth patterns from the U.S. Census Bureau, American Demographics found that Gen Y, too, can be looked at in terms of three distinct age groups. Gen Y is usually defined as those born between the years 1977 and 1994; the youngest in this generation is 7 years old this year, the oldest 24. We found that 36 percent of this generation has reached adulthood; this year they will be between the ages of 18 and 24. Another 34 percent are teens, currently 12- to 17-years-old; 30 percent are pre-pubescent "'tweens," ranging in age from 7 to 11 this year.

"Just like Baby Boomers, Gen Y is a very large generation, so particularly at different life stages, it makes sense to look at them in terms of older and younger groups," says Susan Mitchell, demographer and author of American Generations. Adds Louis Pol, demographer at the University of Omaha: "It's essential to look at the different formative experiences within a generation - what they've experienced and what they've witnessed growing up."

Formative experiences are significant in that they help mold specific preferences and beliefs - psychographic tendencies that marketers use in developing messages to target varying groups of people. Yet, formative experiences and the resultant attitudes, sensibilities, hot buttons and cultural reference points can vary for members at either end of the generational spectrum. In carving up Baby Boomers into three subgroups in the 1990s, Yankelovich based the segments on how old Boomers were in 1969, which it considered to be a watershed year in Boomer lore. Arguably, a comparably significant year for Gen Y has not yet occurred - or if it has, historians have yet to put it in perspective.

But the pace of business has changed dramatically since the 1960s, and marketers are especially eager to understand this next generation of consumers. In an attempt to predict what the formative experiences and resulting psychographics may be for Gen Y, American Demographics interviewed a dozen demographers, sociologists and marketing experts about the cultural and historical events that have taken place so far. To help us understand this huge generation, we asked this panel of experts to name some events that have had enough impact to possibly become defining moments for this generation. While this information is less than scientific, these opinions may provide businesses with insight into creating more targeted marketing messages for this generation. According to the experts, here are some recent events that have impacted Gen Y's lives today - events that may shape the attitudes of this generation in the long run:

COLUMBINE

Although school violence actually decreased dramatically during the 1990s and the percentage of high school students carrying a weapon dropped to 19 percent in 1997 from 26 percent in 1991, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the attention paid to school violence has increased exponentially. In particular, the impact of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., and the subsequent news coverage is likely to affect today's youth in two ways: Gen Ys are not only more careful and watchful about their own personal safety, but they are also more wary of the news media's interpretation of, or intrusion into, their personal sphere.