Gauravonomics Blog

Welcome to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!

Neil Howe — who has co-authored several books about the cyclic nature of American generations — shares some contrarian views about the millenials in an interesting interview with Brandweek (via Murketing). Millenials, by the way, are Americans born after the early eighties.

- Millenials do use social media to express themselves creatively, but their overarching objective is to form new connections and communities –

Millennials are changing information technology. Instant messaging, chat rooms, texting and, above all, social networking. It’s a return to community, but in virtual space. It’s surprising how they are recreating community within the context of a new technology.

It’s easy for millennials to express themselves today, but it’s done within the context of a generation that enjoys being with each other and enjoys customization as a novel way of forming friendships and forming groups. The social-networking phenomenon is taking place within the context of this incredibly vast and intense and unremitting social immersion experience. This is the most connected generation in world history.

The overwhelming, dominant purpose of social network sites is to further intensify the close social networks millennials have with their own lives in school, work or wherever they are. It’s important to keep that in mind, because when Xers think about the amount of time millennials spend online, they think of it in Xer ways—how they’re doing strange new things and going outside the box. That clearly is not what millennials are doing. Even what they’re doing with music is in a social context; they’re customizing music to share with others.

- The millenials’s active use of social networking is rooted in their broader commitment to the idea of community —

Millenials (have) a desire to not disappoint their parents or their friends. We find a huge increase in team teaching, team grading, community service, service learning—a whole range of activities in which they are acting in team-like ways.

The idea of teamwork is not just [to be] with your friends; it’s the whole community. That’s why you engage in community service; that is why you vote and that’s why you want the company you work for to serve the larger community.

– The millenials’ need for shared experiences may lead to the revival of big brands –

I think that millennials are capable of regenerating the whole notion of the big brand. The idea of the big brand went into decline with the Gen Xers and certainly during the late boomer period. Gen X was a generation that didn’t even want to be thought of as a generation, and it had a lot of little niches. There was never a Top 40 group of songs everyone listened to, and the generation is spread out in terms of wealth. They were cynical toward anything that was big, and this gave rise to niche and viral marketing. The whole concept of the Long Tail is perfectly designed for Gen X.

With millennials you’re returning to the fatter portion of the bell curve. This is a generation that wants to feel that they do have a center of gravity. So you’ll see the emergence of huge brands with this generation. Look at [what happened with] Harry Potter. Think of the idea of the big brand as being a dimension of the return to community.

Neil Howe is right that the need for shared experiences is at the core of both social networking and big brands. However, big brands can only act as intermediaries for passive shared experiences, whereas the shared experiences enabled by social networking are active, and the community itself creates the experiences. It’s possible for brands to enable communities to create powerful shared experiences, but only when the brands concede the center stage to the community.

So, I don’t really get the connection, or the causality, between the social media type of community and the big brand type of community. But, maybe, I’m not supposed to get it. I’m a Generation Xer, after all.