Who’s In Charge Now? Move Over Boomers!

What makes today’s young families different from my own young family back in the eighties? Don't parents still want the best for their kids...a great education, nice vacations, a safe and decent home in which to live? Of course they do. But, there are things they don’t want…like confrontation, for example. Younger people called "millennials" seek compromise and are prepared to give and take in order to achieve resolution of issues before going forward. This is why we find politics, business, marketing, opinion leadership…everything…in the most significant state of change we’ve ever witnessed. Why would Justin Trudeau make marijuana a pivotal point in taking on the governing Harper Conservatives? Because his party researchers discovered that the issue is no longer of importance to a massively growing segment of the adult population who are just moving on...and he's impacted positively in the polls.

I watched a video of a speech delivered recently by a highly respected radio programmer who dates back to my time in managing that business. It didn’t tell me a lot I didn’t know but it certainly reminded me of some thoughts I’d “misplaced”. The first is that the baby boom (my) generation no longer pilots the pace car…that job has been handed to the millennials. Who are they? They are baby boomers’ kids…sometimes called ‘Generation Y’ or ‘echo kids’, they were born between about 1977 and the late nineties…so young families where parents are in their early thirties are the leading edge. The singles, and there are many, count too. It’s the next great generation, size-wise, and makes up about 25-30% of the population. We cannot underestimate its importance…it is  why social conservatism is fading away and why my generation (which tends to plant its feet in cement and takes intransigent positions) doesn’t communicate well with millennials.

Experts suggest millennials, like every prior generation, are a product of their  environment and the prevailing conditions of their formative years. This group has many of the traits of its' grandparents' generation but not so much of its'  parents’ approach to life. They are more civic-minded and care about their community, both locally and globally. They are prepared to contribute but, unlike their parents, their mantra is compromise and not confrontation. They don’t care for institutional groups but enjoy broadened friendships and they communicate directly using the tools they were given, basically at birth, and which have been refined and improved ever since. While my generation looks back and longs for the “good old days”, millennials (50%) say the best years are yet to come. Perhaps that’s because they inherited unemployment and student debt versus the great post WWII times our parents gave to us.

Baby boomers continue to discuss same sex relationships, abortion, legalization of marijuana, and universal health care. Millennials are past those decisions and are now well down the road onto newer concerns which include creating wealth and do not include politics as we know it. In fact, they are more fiscally conservative than we are..not at all extravagant...and socially, they have become extremely liberal. What does this say about how society is going to be managing itself and developing good governance going forward? Think compromise and you're on the right track. 

Millennials have delayed significantly on a number of things we boomers did early…leaving their parents’ homes; getting married; having children (if/when/how many); seeking meaningful work (which is far less plentiful). And they are, for the most part, neither concerned with nor tolerant of organized religion. It is no surprise that Pope Francis, in an effort to relate that I don't view as coincidental, is more interested in having gay couples show up for mass than dispatching them from church altogether by criticizing their orientation.

It is difficult to entertain or inform millennials because they have the power to self-deliver what they want to see and hear whenever and wherever they like. City dwellers are less concerned with having cars; more concerned about who their friends are and with how they look. They have little time for bullshit and can detect it a mile away…they demand authenticity. For opinion leaders and politicians, this is a sea change, a curve ball...because millennials “get it” when messages are being crafted for them. They want and can readily identify ideas and policies that directly matter to them. They want truth and they expect us to admit when we’re wrong because being wrong sometimes is okay with them...nobody's perfect.

Millennials are just more easygoing. Hype them and they’ll run the other way. That changes how things are decided, advertised, sold, or discussed. Think of a traditional menu as an example..."farm fresh eggs" had better be fresh from the farm! Consider visual advertising or TV talk shows. Millennials are less “Meet the Press” and more “The View”, less Brian Williams and more Jon Stewart. They believe that fairness and respect actually matter. One might argue that our generation did that too…but we’d be deceiving ourselves. What millennials seek is a mutual evenhandedness which our generation feigned more than practiced. It's about having a discussion where we sometimes actually walk away "agreeing to disagree" yet not thinking less of the person heading in the opposite direction.

Here’s something really wonderful and perhaps surprising about millennials…they are optimists. They maintain their dreams because, unlike us, they were born into a significantly more difficult period than prior generations. That helps them to be happy because dreaming is a happy pursuit. Baby boomers, for the most part, were handed a lot and taught to always expect more. It isn't that previous generations didn't seek happiness...they did! But millennials put a higher premium on being liked and being viewed as fun to be around than their forbears did. I look back at myself and my contemporaries while in our thirties and we wanted (demanded?) respect and control…being liked was a nice added (but not required) benefit.

Millennials thrive on diversity – different kinds of people, different fields of endeavor, different ideologies. They appreciate an open society and, in fact, their kids will likely be the first generation in western society that will not be white-dominated. Quite a change in fifty years, right?

It’s a strange thing to view myself as “older” - I discussed that in my first ever "Shurmanations" blog - it’s hard for everyone. But, for me, my lengthy career has mostly been about the marketing of ideas. Broadcasting and politics have been dominant themes in my life and were primary in terms of both medium and message for the boomer years. Now, with no surprise, the media are social in nature while the message is about vast choice and compromise. And so the result is that my generation either "gets with the program" or has an unenjoyable time to look forward to watching from the cheap seats for the twenty or thirty years we have left.

Peter