Post by account_disabled on Jan 9, 2024 5:51:22 GMT
When approaching consumers, many brands systematically stumble over the same stone: that of putting all people assigned by age to a specific generation in the same bag (as if the generations were signs of the zodiac and each of them were governed by identical designs due to the mere fact of having been born in a certain time frame). And the truth is that such a simplification is totally inadmissible (although unfortunately ubiquitous). It is enough to listen to common sense to see that it is a completely meaningless strategy to consider generations of consumers as if they were immovable and absolutely watertight targets , explains Peter Kiefer in an article for Meedia . People buy based on very different motivations that are not necessarily due to age. No one is 100% identical to their contemporaries simply because they belong to the same generation. And although marketers will find it extraordinarily lacerating to hear this truth as a temple, generations are in no way synonymous with target audience groups.
Even so, why does Generation Z systematically appear as a target in the “briefings” that brands send to agencies? Why can't marketers suppress grimaces of pleasure when hearing Email Data about the (supposedly insurmountable) differences between "boomers" and millennials ? Why do so many studies insist on emphasizing the differences between consumers assigned to different generations if talking about generations is a complete nonsense in marketing terms? This issue is a bit like traffic accidents in the eyes of marketers: they know they shouldn't stare at them, but they still do it. The fascination of marketers with generations metamorphosed into target audience groups emerges from the pure desire for simplification , sought with absolute boldness in increasingly complex times. When they make generations and target audience groups synonymous, marketers fall into the clutches of confirmation bias.
By putting all consumers of a generation in the same bag, marketers actually do themselves a favor and act based on the so-called confirmation bias, looking for trends that only confirm their own beliefs and hypotheses. Assimilating generations and target audience groups is in some way like reading a horoscope : marketers only observe things in which they already believe wholeheartedly and completely overlook things that, for reasons that are not relevant, do not fit them. . It is the pernicious effect of confirmation bias. The insights emanating from the generations studied independently are astonishingly seductive, but only for those who work professionally in the field of sociology, not marketing. It may sound boring, but marketers urgently need to return to the "basics" of their profession in relation to target audience groups (those that have been unfairly forgotten). Segmentation should return to the foreground in the marketing universe in order to understand why certain target audience groups consume certain products in specific categories. This is actually the only valid way to connect with the target that brands are economically interested in , to identify the appropriate messages to reach that target audience and to place such messages in the relevant channels (where the consumer is). , concludes Kiefer.
Even so, why does Generation Z systematically appear as a target in the “briefings” that brands send to agencies? Why can't marketers suppress grimaces of pleasure when hearing Email Data about the (supposedly insurmountable) differences between "boomers" and millennials ? Why do so many studies insist on emphasizing the differences between consumers assigned to different generations if talking about generations is a complete nonsense in marketing terms? This issue is a bit like traffic accidents in the eyes of marketers: they know they shouldn't stare at them, but they still do it. The fascination of marketers with generations metamorphosed into target audience groups emerges from the pure desire for simplification , sought with absolute boldness in increasingly complex times. When they make generations and target audience groups synonymous, marketers fall into the clutches of confirmation bias.
By putting all consumers of a generation in the same bag, marketers actually do themselves a favor and act based on the so-called confirmation bias, looking for trends that only confirm their own beliefs and hypotheses. Assimilating generations and target audience groups is in some way like reading a horoscope : marketers only observe things in which they already believe wholeheartedly and completely overlook things that, for reasons that are not relevant, do not fit them. . It is the pernicious effect of confirmation bias. The insights emanating from the generations studied independently are astonishingly seductive, but only for those who work professionally in the field of sociology, not marketing. It may sound boring, but marketers urgently need to return to the "basics" of their profession in relation to target audience groups (those that have been unfairly forgotten). Segmentation should return to the foreground in the marketing universe in order to understand why certain target audience groups consume certain products in specific categories. This is actually the only valid way to connect with the target that brands are economically interested in , to identify the appropriate messages to reach that target audience and to place such messages in the relevant channels (where the consumer is). , concludes Kiefer.