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As part of our creative solutions we need to adapt and deliver our concepts around the target audience.
Where are they likely to live?
What sort of job role or title are they likely to have?
What age are they likely to be?
Regarding age, Jean M. Twenge’s fascinating book “Generations” offers some enlightening insights and focuses on how generations become affected and thus are different from one another due to technological changes within their individual lifetimes.
She outlines the generations and their major changes as follows:
The Silents (1925-1945)
Home appliances & medical advancements.
Baby Boomers (1946-1964)
TV ads – unrealistic lifestyles consumed by image and material possessions.
Gen X (1965-1979)
Computers; analog to digital changed how people communicated with each other.
Millennials (1980-1994)
Internet news, online interaction = increase in self confidence but also then in narcissism.
Gen Z (1995-2012)
Social media – reduced in person socialisation and increased rates of anxiety.
Polars (2013 – 2029)
Online platforms and devices + COVID – increased political polarisation.
Overall shift in society from collectivism to individualism.
She writes:
“As the primary instigator of generational and cultural change, technology presents the ultimate trade-off. Technology has given us instant communications, unrivalled convenience, and the most precious prize of all: longer lives with less drudgery. At the same time, technology has isolated us from each other, sowed political division, fuelled income inequality, spread pervasive pessimism, widened generation gaps, stolen our attention, and is the primary culprit for mental health crisis among teens and young adults. This is the challenge for all six generations in the decades to come: to find a way for technology to bring us together instead of driving us apart.”
The entire Generation labelling really started from 1991 with Douglas Coupland’s “Generation X”, ironically as a way to describe people feeling disconnected, opting out of society and who were sick and tired of labels. Here Twenge describes in great detail about the effects technology has on shaping generational behaviour. You can see that someone, for example, growing up in office environment surrounded by the smell of people smoking and the sound of typewriters and ringing telephones has quite a different experience than someone today.
Is there a way to switch off our phones more and pay attention to the world around us including the people we share our time with?
Twenge continues:
“This all plays out in an online media that emphasises the negative, heightening generational conflicts that might not be so severe if people discussed them face to face.”
Amen to that I say.
Which begs the question:
What does the future hold for the upcoming generation and if we were to fast forward a decade and look back – what will history say about us then?
