We will continue last month’s conversation on generational differences with a discussion on marketing to different generations. Of course, each generation has some subtle differences in its preferences.
The four generations we will be discussing are today’s consumers. They are:
- Baby Boomers – born between 1946 – 1964 between 58 – 76 years old.
- Generation X – born between 1965 – 1980 between 42 – 57 years old.
- Millennials – born between 1981 – 1997 between 25 – 41 years old.
- Gen Z – born between 1998 – 2011 between 12 – 24 years old
We spoke about the importance of creating an ideal client customer avatar in last month’s blog post. Your ideal client will only be in one of these generations. It is essential to understand who you are talking to and how you can best reach your target to succeed in sales.
If you are marketing to different generations as your target market, you will need to take an omnichannel approach. You will need to consider online and offline touchpoints appropriate for each generation.
Each generation is at a similar stage in life and is shaped by experience throughout their lives. As a result, each generation shares similarities and differences in purchasing items or services.
There will be exceptions to behavior for members of each group, but generally, each group shares certain similarities.
A commonality between each generation is that they prefer personalized communications from the brands to which they are loyal.
As time passes and events occur, consumer habits may also change. For example, many patterns changed during the pandemic due to the circumstances.
The Covid-19 pandemic has changed some consumers’ behaviors in the following ways:
- Baby Boomers preferred brick-and-mortar stores but now have adopted online shopping. Having a preference for brick and mortar, they favor curbside pick-up.
- Generation X was less likely to shop online because they preferred to see and feel the material of the product they were purchasing. Therefore, they need to have a detailed description of the product when purchasing or are likely to return it.
- Millennials have always been community and value-driven consumers. They began making more purchases through social media.
- Generation Z has been craving normalcy through the pandemic. So they purchased live services like exercise or cooking classes online.
Marketing became more critical as a means to reach clients during the pandemic. Improving marketing’s ROI also became more important. Internet sales reach record highs jumping from 13.5% of sales in February 2020 to 19.4% of sales in February 2021.
As changes in consumer behavior changed, so did marketing. However, it is important to keep in mind that each generation behaves differently, is motivated by different things, and uses media differently. The Oxford College of Marketing summarizes the changes in marketing over the years in this blog post.
It is essential to understand what drives each generation to choose an option. These differences occur because of the things going on in the world and the availability of different technologies as they grew up.
