Marketing to Millennials, Part One

We’ve all heard the term – “Millennials.” Equally loved as being a compassionate, forward-thinking generation that will mold the future and derided as lazy, self-centered and tech-obsessed, Millennials are a polarizing bunch.

Technically, Millennials are defined as those born between about 1981 and 1996. The years can be shifted a little in either direction, but generally, Millennials are the children of younger Baby Boomers and older Gen-Xers, who grew into the turn of the century and came of age with the advent (or really, explosion) of the internet. Regardless of what you think about them or how you define them, they’re here to stay, and their buying power and influence on the economy will continue to grow as Millennials start families and settle into adult lives.

This means for marketers and businesses, getting in touch with Millennials and understanding how to market to them is a key concept for success in 2020 and moving forward. Remember, this generation makes up about 25% of the current U.S. population, eclipsing Baby Boomers in 2019 to take their place as the largest generational cohort in the country.

So, what is the problem? For many, it’s that Millennials are a misunderstood generation, in an outside-looking-in sense. A quick browse through the internet after putting “Millennial” into a search engine or browsing around on a social media platform paints a picture of a generation that killed several industries while championing a handful of social causes and arguing with Baby Boomers. But taking a narrow view of Millennials is the first step to not understanding the generation as a whole and missing out on the benefit of harnessing America’s largest generation’s buying power.

To help you better understand Millennials (and how to market to them!), we’re introducing a multi-part series, Marketing to Millennials, designed to help marketers of all generations understand how to promote their products and services to Generation Y. To help make it easier to understand, we’re breaking the series into multiple blog posts to help tell the whole story.

Here in part one, we’ll preview the following parts along with the above words of introduction on the topic.

For part two, we’ll examine the minds of Millennials, to get a better understanding of how the generation tends to think, what some of their biggest values are, and how those values affect their relationship with the products and services that they care about. We’ll even look at how the world at large affected Millennial thinking, and what that means for businesses today.

In part three, we’ll look at the habits and lifestyles of Millennials today, to better understand a typical Millennial’s lifestyle, interests and spending habits.

Finally, for part four of the series, we will consider the future of the marketing landscape as Millennials age and progress as parents, homeowners and business owners. We’ll even look at Gen Z, the generation entering the workforce and economy now, and consider the ways in which they’re similar (and different) to Millennials and what it all means.

Now that we’ve laid out all the parts, it’s time to get started. So, everyone grab your iPhone charger and turn on some Britney Spears or Blink-182. It’s time to learn how to Market to Millennials.