After reading the article and listening to the podcast, I do feel that I am being captured accurately. From what I have seen and heard, I am very typical as a member of Generation Y. I don’t feel that the stereotype of young people in Generation Y that Ellen Neuborn and Jesse Hempel gave was too narrow. In my opinion, the majority of their descriptions of my generation was actually quite accurate. There are many essential truths to much of what they said.
Jesse Hempel talked about how Generation Y young people are overwhelmed with the numerous media types available right now. This is very true. I am about to graduate from UT and many times even I find it difficult to focus on studying or doing homework assignments for my classes. With so many things happening on the internet and TV, it is very easy for me to get distracted. For example, I probably check my e-mail about every 30 minutes or every hour. Is this necessary for me to do? Not really, but I like to think that I’m making sure that I haven’t receive any new e-mails from my professors.
I connected with Jesse’s discussion about how popular social networking sites are among my generation. Facebook.com and MySpace.com are very popular among my circle of friends. I have a profile on both websites. I was referred to both by friends. The vast majority of my friends have a profile one or the other. Many of them have a profile on both websites. I would feel socially handicapped if I did not have a profile on at least one of them. Like Jesse said, marketers should definitely take advantage of the number of young people that access these social networking websites each day by creating advertisements that are geared towards my generation.
Jesse and Ellen mentioned that young people couldn’t care less about advertisements that are not real and authentic to them. I couldn’t agree more. Because of the large amounts of advertisements I have seen each and every day since I was a little kid, I have become almost desensitized to them. Agreeing with Jesse, I feel it is vital right now for companies to use interactive marketing if they want to effectively market to my generation. If a company has a product that I am initially interested in, I want to be able to quickly access information pertinent to me about that product. If that company has interactive marketing in place, then I will have options to choose from that will let me find the information I want to see and hear.
Ellen is very right when she says that baby boomer brands need to pay special attention to the way my generation selects products and fully understand how my generation thinks. If these brands would like to stay around and remain competitive for many years to come, they are going to need to make necessary adjustments to their product assortment and marketing strategies.
Each year my generation’s buying power increases. After I graduate and start working full-time, I will have much more money to spend than I currently have. I have many large buying decisions coming my way very rapidly. Marketers will soon find out if they did a good job forming insights about me and my generation.
