As companies prepare their go-to marketing strategy for the coming year, there is no better time to call their attention to where most of the money lies. As of today, the money is in the hands of two generations: Millennials and Generation Zers.
In 2015, millennials became the generation with the most purchasing power in the United States. The 2020 Consumer Report Culture Report says they are still going to be the highest spending generation, spending some $1.4 trillion in purchasing.
Gen Zers, on the other hand, are far behind at $34 billion spending power, but they are growing fast behind the millennials and also hold the power of influencing close to $600 billion in spending.
Brands with short-term and long-term goals can no longer ignore either of the two. These generations, according to several findings, will only grow in spending power over the years.
But to have a share of those big dollars as a business owner, knowing want they want is key.
Some companies have been dedicated to studying these nascent humans for years, and this post is here to help put in perspective what their studies are currently indicating.
Read on to see four of those things.
1. Less bureaucracy
“Once customers characterize an organization as bureaucratic, they also tend to believe that the organization has products and services of inferior quality (compared with non-bureaucratic organizations),” says Ken Johnston, the author of Bursting Bureaucracy.
Organizations with steep bureaucratic curves are known to do the following: make customers move from one representative to another, make them go through too much paper works to make a report, take too long to respond to complaints, take too long to solve a problem, etc.
It just so happens that millennials and generation Zers grew up in the digital age, and technology has conditioned them to want things at a speed of light.
This, though, is not the only problem a bureaucracy-addled company faces in the hands of millennials and generation Zers.
It also faces the problem of too many competitions who are just a click away from them because of their access to smartphones.
Businesses that fall victim to their own bureaucracy will watch as competitors run away with their customers.
With smartphones at hand and an unapologetic addiction to the Internet, these computer-age generations are just a click away from becoming loyal to your competitor.
If you aim to have millennials and generation Zers as your customers, aim for less red tapes and let efficiency build loyalty into the heart of your young customers.
2. Corporate social responsibility
As the Coronavirus pandemic raged on in the US in 2020, protests broke out across America over the death of George Floyd, and the movement #BlackLivesMatter quickly became a global sensation.
As these went on, YPulse, an organization dedicated to the study of young consumers, conducted research and found that 69% of Millennial and Generation Z think brands should be involved in #BlackLivesMatter.
For the record, this isn’t a new trend in the bias of millennials and Gen Zers towards brands. Neither is it an outlier.
In a RetailMeNot’s 2018 finding cited by eMarketer, the result revealed that 74% of millennials want more brands to take public stands on important social values.
And save that this is not a place for unsubstantiated claims, feelers have been hinting that these young generations are somewhat interlinked to one another, perhaps due to the lack of geographic barrier.
In any case, no smart marketer can ignore the fact that the biggest brands in the world are all into one kind of CSR or another and it works. A study by Quinnipiac University revealed that Nike’s feature of Kaepernick in its advertisements earned it the approval of millennials by 67% – 21% margin.
As far back as 2018, I wrote in an article for Entrepreneur magazine how CSR can increase your bottom line as a business.
If your goal is to have the loyalty of millennials and generation Zers — which you should definitely aim for — then it is time for you to identify with a social cause.
3. Every-time availability
Each generation has a culture that shapes its cognitive orientation and biases. Millennials and Gen Zers are the first true digital-born generation, and they have been conditioned to want things done at the speed of light, as earlier remarked.
They also happen to live at a time when businesses are springing up from time to time; big businesses circling the smaller ones in orgies of merger and acquisition, and sometimes, copying their ideas completely.
From social media to fashion designs to mobile phones to automobiles, they are never short of options.
Do not make the mistake of assuming they will wait if your brand delays or disappoints.
This has been verified by a report from Accenture which affirms that, on average, 89% of shoppers say having access to real-time product availability information would influence their shopping choices in terms of which stores they would frequent.
If you are thinking of how this finding applies, who better than the millennials use the Internet?
4. Process automation
There is a good reason we refer to them as the digital generations.
They are the generations that would rather store files on electronic document management systems rather than in papers.
They are the generation that would rather study using online course platforms rather than be on a physical campus.
They consume news on blogs and social media platforms rather than do it on paper.
You don’t need expensive research to tell you that they live for the automation comfort of this century.
And every business entity today try to pander to them one way or another.
From Amazon to Salesforce to online market places, everyone is employing automation to ensure that these generations are well-satisfied.
If your goal is to have them as loyal customers –which you should definitely aim for — then you can no longer neglect automating as many parts of your businesses as possible.
Conclusion
This post looks like an appeal to pander to the younger generations. And in truth, that is what it is.
If the younger generations are loyal to your brand, there is a chance your business will succeed big time.
This is what the Lindy Effect means. If Apple had focused on the older generations in its earlier days, it might as well make more profit than it did, but it will not be the most valuable company in the world today.
Think about this, and think about where you want your brand to be in years to come.
Ali Faagba is a copywriter and content marketing consultant. He has been featured in Entrepreneur, Business2Community, SEW, and a host of other industry-leading publications. He blogs at contentmarketingprofit.com.
Millennials stock photo by AlessandroBiascioli/Shutterstock
