Gen BuY

How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail

Kit Yarrow, Jayne O'Donnell

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780470523636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

Discover the forces driving the decisions of today's most sought after consumers

According to recent statistics, members of Generation Y shop 25 percent to 40 percent more than the average consumer. In Gen BuY, Yarrow and O'Donnell argue that these voracious and fearless consumers have revolutionized the way Americans shop by turning traditional sales and marketing strategies upside down. Based on solid research, the book offers an in-depth look at what motivates these young people to buy certain products and reject others. The authors reveal what makes these consumers tic-how they define power, why they loath manipulation, and why they rely on technology-and show marketers how they can tap into the buying power of this burgeoning group of consumers.

• Shows what it takes to successfully woe and win young consumers with purchasing power
• Filled with surprising insights into the psyche of Gen Y buyers
• Written by an expert in consumer research and a well-connected media consumer author

Gen Buy is a must-have resource for marketers, advertisers, retailers, and manufacturers who want to understand the new generation of consumers.

1

GENY IS FROM MERCURY

Courtney, twenty-eight, a new attorney living in Washington, D.C., had a “destination wedding” in 2007 and was delighted that her parents were able to stay for the honeymoon. Her five bridesmaids (all friends from college) and their husbands also stuck around. Courtney had been a bridesmaid in each of their weddings, which had taken place in locations scattered around the globe over the past three years, and her parents and brother had attended each of those weddings as well. Courtney and her mom, who lives across the country in San Francisco, planned every aspect of the wedding together—from the custom M&M’s to Dad’s outfit. They emailed ideas, web addresses, and photos to each other almost daily, and both said with big grins and giggles that it was “so much fun!” Friends and family could follow along with the wedding plans on the couple’s website and view photos and videos immediately following the ceremony. Gift selection was a snap thanks to a coordinated online registry, and wrapping and shipping was done in a click.

Courtney’s egalitarian friendship with her parents and her enduring pack of friends from college are part of what makes this generation different. So is the technical ease with which they communicate and shop, their comfort navigating the globe and different cultures, and even their delight in (and willingness to spend big bucks for) customized M&M’s.

This generation, the product of a transformed world, is to previous generations as man is to woman and Mars is to Venus. Which is to say: basically the same, but entirely different. Generation Y is unquestionably unique, and some say potentially one of the most powerful and influential generations ever.

Gen Y is diverse, adaptive, and confident. Fewer than two-thirds of them are white, over 25 percent are raised in single parent households, and three-quarters have working moms. Their generation’s size—almost eighty-four million members—helps give them unprecedented influence; their confidence and their ability to connect with others guarantee it.

Raised in an era packed with cultural and economic shifts, technological wizardry, and the “self-esteem movement”—to name just a few of the major changes—it’s no wonder Gen Yers are motivated by different messages, want different products, and relate to each other, marketers, and retailers differently from previous generations.

Before we spill the beans: want to test your knowledge of the world of Generation Y? Take our quiz.

Kit and Jayne’s True and False YQ Quiz

1. Email is the preferred form of digital communication for teenagers.

False. A 2008 study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project showed that email is teens’ least favorite form of digital communication, with only 16 percent of teens using email daily, compared with 36 percent texting daily and 29 percent sending instant messages every day.¹

2. Working teens are likely to have greater discretionary spending power than their parents.

True. According to Harrison Group’s Teens in the Marketplace Report, working teens pocket an average of $597 each month—and without those pesky nondiscretionary expenses like mortgage payments, on average they end up with more spending money than their parents.²

3. Teen girls are more likely than teen boys to have online friends that they’ve never met in person.

False. According to the “Marketing to Teens and Tweens” study by EPM Communications, boys ages fifteen to seventeen were more likely than any other age or gender group to have friends they’ve never met in the flesh, at 47 percent. In the tween category, 29 percent of boys ages twelve to fourteen and 22 percent of girls twelve to fourteen had friends they know only in the virtual world.³

4. More people watched Sarah Palin’s appearance on Saturday Night Live online than on TV.

True. While fifteen million people watched on TV, even more watched on NBC.com, YouTube, Yahoo, MySpace, and Hulu.⁴

5. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s learners will have nine to ten jobs by the age of thirty-eight. False. They’re expected to have ten to fourteen jobs by the age of thirty-eight.⁵

6. “Omg jk!! LOL u kno ily. nyway whatchu doen 2nite? I g2g 2 din wit da rents but bbl. u hangen out?” (a text sent to Irina, seventeen) translates to: “Oh my God I’m just kidding! Laughing out loud. You know I love you. Anyway, what are you doing tonight? I have to go to dinner with my parents but I’ll be back later. Are you hanging out?” True.

7. Eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds are more likely than any other adult group to think that technology makes people lazy.

True. Eighty-four percent of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds said technology makes people lazier, compared with 67 percent of adults over twenty-six. They were also slightly more likely to believe that technology was responsible for isolation and time wasting. And almost three-fourths of the age group claims their generation posts excessive personal information on the Internet.⁶

8. Gen Yers may love their computers, but when it comes to entertainment nothing beats the television.

False. According to Deloitte, three-quarters of fourteen-to twenty-five-year-olds view their computer as more of an entertainment device than their television. The 2009 report also found that 59 percent of Gen Yers use their mobile phone as an entertainment device (versus 33 percent of all consumers).⁷

9. A majority of young adults see their generation as unique.

True. A 2007 Pew Research Center for the People and the Press survey showed 68 percent of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds found their generation to be unique and distinct from all others.⁸ According to a 2008 Harris Interactive survey of nearly four thousand Americans aged twenty-one to eighty-three, Gen Y is seen as the most “self-indulgent” generation, Gen X as the most “innovative,” boomers as most “productive,” and our eldest generation as most “admired.”⁹

10. When asked how they spend their day, average teens will tell you that nearly half of their activities are driven by technology.

True. Four out of their five top activities involve technology. As of November 2008, the average teen expects to spend over $300 on consumer electronics in the next six months, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. ¹⁰

11. The number of text messages sent and received each day exceeds the population of the earth.

True.¹¹ ’Nuff said.

12. Twitter is the chirp of a small bird and has nothing to do with technology.

False. Twitter is a free microblogging service through which users can send and read others’ major and not-so-major updates on their lives. The site, which once seemed to specialize in mindless minutiae (“I’m eating a really good sandwich!”), has now expanded so that brands, retailers, celebrities, and politicians regularly use Twitter to get their messages out. Flight cancellations, new product arrivals, job availabilities, and peanut salmonella updates can all be found on Twitter. Launched in 2006, Twitter grew by over 1,382 percent between February 2008 and February 2009. In February 2009 there were 9.8 million unique visitors.¹²

13. A new blog is created nearly every second of every day.

False. Make that over two new blogs created every second of every day, and 1.6 million posts are made on existing blogs each day.¹³

14. If you started today, it would take you just under a year to view all the material on YouTube.

False. It would take you over four hundred years.¹⁴

How’d you do? If you got nine or more right, we’re impressed. And because you’re the kind of person who craves information, we’ve got some whys behind those facts coming up, so read on. Eight or fewer? In the spirit of Gen Y, you get a trophy too, but you might also want to keep reading—you need to know Y, and you’ve got some catching up to do.

The Two Greatest Influences

Though some may point to social or political events such as the Columbine shootings, the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, the fall of the Soviet Union, and even the death of Princess Diana as the forces that have shaped Gen Y, there are two profoundly influential factors that outweigh the rest: their adoring parents and the digital world.

Adoring Parents

Gen Y children are considered to be the most wanted children of all time, and they’ve grown up in an era of exploding interest in and knowledge about child development and psychology. Unlike previous generations of parents—who certainly wanted and loved their children, but also saw them as responsibilities—or even earlier generations, who felt the same way but saw them as potential laborers—today’s parents prize their children as more equal and central members of the household. Additionally, no society in history has had a greater focus on, interest in, and understanding of the child.

And even though nearly half of Gen Y children have divorced parents, and one-third come from single-parent households, those parents still spent more focused time with their Gen Y kids than any previous generation. The greater attention and parental involvement of fathers as central figures in parenting has also had a great effect on the sense of Gen Yers that they are important and central. Additionally, technology brings families even closer, thanks to the frequent contact between kids and parents that cell phones afford.

Gen Y parents have been criticized for coddling, for impairing their child’s independence by hovering like helicopters, for being enmeshed in or overly dependent on their kid’s approval. These characteristics are generally more true of this generation than of previous ones, and in the course of our research we certainly did see examples of just the sort of behavior that’s inspired these descriptions (including moms who know who’s asking whom to the prom before their kids do), and also plenty of parents dependent on their kids’ success for their own egos. But what we also saw were “helicopters” who might also have been described as simply interested, involved parents; “coddlers” who could have been called warm, nurturing parents; and “overly dependent parents” who might have been seen as folks who value their kid’s minds and opinions.

“My parents are super homey,” says nineteen-year-old Bren-dan, a member of our Portland focus group. “My mom is the chillest of all our parents; she trusts me.” Of course, one Portland participant spoke for many when he described some moms as “grown-up high school girls” or “too concerned about their image. They need you to get on honor roll so they can tell their friends ‘my kid got on the honor roll.”’

We found it most helpful to view Gen Y parents on a normally distributed curve, with those clearly overinvolved, coddling helicopters at one end; some relatively disengaged parents at the other end; and most of the group in the middle—registering more kid-centric than the last generation of parents, but not ’coptering coddlers either.

Being a wanted kid in a child-centered household adds to your clout, of course. Gen Y households are the most egalitarian of all time, and Gen Y parents tend to be nonauthoritarian and to value their friendships with their kids. This is one of the primary reasons behind Gen Y’s confidence and power—and also helps to explain how Gen Yers were able to earn their impressive shopping stripes so young and have such a tremendous impact on the purchasing decisions of older generations.

Their Digital World

The second most important factor that’s shaped the uniqueness of this generation is their enmeshment with technology and their ability to harness the power of the Internet. This sophistication has increased their influence in their households, added a pedal-to-the-metal element to their cognitive and social styles, reinforced and equipped a team mentality, and empowered them.

Household Clout. In addition to their kid-centric clout, Gen Yers typically provide in-house tech support for their parents, which has reinforced their stature as equals—or even superiors, at least in the IT department. It’s also made them the great force to be reckoned with by electronics marketers. When they have prized knowledge and expertise, it becomes pretty hard to discount the thoughts and abilities of a kid. Previous generations had to pretend or humor their kids (“Let’s frame your Picasso!”), but in the case of this generation, their intuitive ease with technology and their ability to adapt to technological shifts is a genuine asset to any family. Having never experienced a world without computers, the Internet, cell phones, and digital cameras, Gen Yers are free of anxiety and full of playfulness when they interact with the Internet and technology of all sorts. This makes learning easier for them than it is for all but the most tech-savvy parents.

Seeing as we all know better than to tick off the techies, the glow of this expertise has contributed to the confidence of this generation. It also means that kids have more of a vote and more power in family decision making. That includes far more than technology and extends to things like vacation destinations, cars, and Dad’s outfits too. To give you a sense of the pervasiveness of these junior in-house techies, according to a survey of over six thousand of our youngest Gen Yers—the eight- to fourteen-year-olds—most say that they have “online chores” that include sharing pictures with relatives (38 percent) and getting driving directions (35 percent), and a few even help with income tax returns (14 percent).¹⁵

Speed, Power, and Self-Reliance. Put simply, they want what they want when they want it. As the first generation raised from day one under the influence of the Internet, the world, as they know it, means speed; multitasking; instant answers; always available friends, parents, teachers, and experts; a connection to others that defies geography and hierarchy; less necessity for face-to-face (or voice-to-voice) human interaction; and free access to information for everyone.

Kit noticed, during a recent guest lecture at UC Berkeley, that at least half of her students were typing. A quick cruise around the room revealed about half of those typists were looking up her articles, an international stude...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - GENY IS FROM MERCURY
• Chapter 2 - THEY SHOP LIKE THEY’RE FROM A DIFFERENT PLANET FROM THEIR PARENTS, TOO
• Chapter 3 - THE WHYS BEHIND THE BUYS
• Chapter 4 - THE LIVES, MINDS, AND HEARTS OF TODAY’S TWEENS, TEENS, AND TWENTY-SOMETHINGS
• Chapter 5 - SEX, LOVE, AND SHOPPING
• Chapter 6 - INFLUENCE: THE FORCE THAT IS GEN Y
• Chapter 7 - WHAT WORKS WITH GEN Y
• Chapter 8 - ADAPTING TO GEN Y’S SHOPPING PREFERENCES AND POWER
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• Index