By Dave McCaughan & Faiyaz Ahmed
Co-Founders of Marketing Futures
“These Gen Z people are really going too much…”, a recent Facebook post started like this, to which we ask, “what do you mean ‘Gen Z’?” because, this whole Gen X, Y, Z, thing is just a silly way to think about people, especially if you are a businessperson or a marketer. What the author of that post meant to say was, “these young people.” It would be true, at least to us in an older stage in our lives, that young people really do go too far sometimes. But, there lies our point.
Being young and rebellious and wanting to challenge ‘the man’ has been a feature of being a young adult since that phrase first appeared in the 1950s, and well before. People everywhere go through a life stage in their youth that is all about challenging and identifying who they are and how they are different, or rather, how they think they can present themselves as different from previous generations of young people who also wanted to prove they were different. And so on, and so on.
Every generation goes through the same life stages, with the same core desires and needs. It’s just that the way we access, describe, or act out tactically changes.
Back in the mid-90s, Dave started studying the core life stages across Asia Pacific countries. In the early ‘00s, Faiyaz joined him in studying them in Bangladesh. Across the decades, rather than thinking of people as Gen X, Y or Alpha, it is much more strategic and sensible to understand which life stage they are in and how that life stage affects what matters to them.
Life stages are defined by key traits, no matter which decade you were born in. Childhood: from birth to teenhood and dependence on parents. Identity Builders: teens to early 20s, not yet a fully independent adult, focused on discovering themselves and what life offers. Career Builders: the first decade of working life, when finding, getting, and managing a job is the priority, along with figuring out how to use money, and finding longer relationships. Family Builders: the decades when it is all about having and educating children, making payments, and trying not to be too stressed. Extended 20s: increasingly for some, the alternative to becoming a family builder is to decide not to have children and to move into their 30s, 40s and beyond as single or a couple. New Life Builders: late 50s through to 75+ when the children have grown up, and they start wondering, “What do I do now?” for the next twenty-odd years.
Dave has been tracking these life stages across dozens of countries for three decades. He has been collecting research on them going back to the 1950s, and together, we have been looking at them here in Bangladesh since 1997. And guess what? Across generations, things don’t change much. Cosmetics, yes. The type of clothes an Identity Builder thinks is ‘cool’ changes. The way a Career Builder finds a job changes. The types of brands a Family Builder buys to feed their child change. But the main issues of the life stages don’t.
Think about pop music. The music of the 1950s and the 2020s is different in style, projection, and method. Take Elvis Presley and Kendrick Lamar. The king of pop and one of his most successful heirs today. They look different. Just like The Rolling Stones and Blackpink look different. But when you actually look at what young people of different generations find in their music, the themes don’t change much. Remember these hit songs? ‘Rail Line Er Oi Bostite’ (‘80s), ‘Shei Tumi’ (‘90s), ‘O Priya Tumi Kothay?’ (‘00s), and ‘Ek Mutho Prem’ (‘10s)? Yes, the styles changed, but the themes didn’t. Go back a hundred years, and what works for young adults (Identity Builders and, yes, Career Builders) is that every decade or so, there is a new singer/band and new sound that might have been pop, rock, heavy metal, punk, grunge, hip-hop, rap or Korean boy bands. But when you listen to the words and the feeling expressed, the music of all generations of young people is either saying “let’s be different”, “let’s change” or asking “how can I find love?”.
Being young is about discovering yourself, whether you are an X, a Z, or a Millennial.
The notion that today’s Gen Z are different from people in their 20s a decade or four ago is fundamentally built on a myth. The Generation X myth. We will explain more in our next column, but, in short, the idea of ‘generations’ was built around a misunderstanding of a 1990 novel written by Douglas Coupland that was called “Generation X”. It is a cleverly written story in which he describes the lives of a few dropout young people living in Las Vegas and how displeased they were with the world. The novel was a hit. And it seemed everyone in business thought it was a manual for understanding the youth of today. But they were/are wrong.
What Dave discovered when he met Coupland a year or so after the book became a hit was that the author did not mean that all people in America, or the whole world for that matter, born in a certain 15-year period, were the same. Rather, young people always want to be seen as their own generation. Every generation has some rebelliousness that wants to think they are different and special.
From that misunderstanding, the lazy thinking of the marketing world left us stuck with the myth that there are so many differences between people born in different decades, whereas the real lesson for business people is to understand what matters to people as they pass through age groups, or lifestages.
At Marketing Futures, we want to help stop that. So here is our offer: each month, we are going to tell you about life stages and how they work and why focusing on them makes the most sense for any business.
We look forward to sharing more.
