Millennials – the same as the rest of us?

I was working on a post on this very theme when the weekly Small Market Radio Newsletter appeared in my inbox and I read my friend Jay Mitchell’s summary of the most recent research into the media consumption habits of Millennials. Seeing no reason to reinvent the wheel, I decided just to share the article verbatim.

One thing I’d add: when discussing “Millennials,” there’s a great temptation to lump the entire generation into one category and assume their attitudes, preferences, and worldview are monolithic. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you want to understand Millennials, you need to understand that they are not a different species from, say, “Baby Boomers” or “Generation Xers.”  Roy H. Williams put it this way in the ninth of his “Ten Most Common Mistakes In Marketing,”

9. Believing that “Millennials” Aren’t Like the Rest of Us

Millennials aren’t a tribe, they are a collection of tribes. They do not behave as a single, cohesive birth cohort. Google “Millennials” and the dictionary definition that will pop up will show the word “millennial” most commonly used in this sentence: “The industry brims with theories on what makes millennials tick.” But when you look at a list of what millennials supposedly want, it’s exactly what the rest of us want. Yes, they’re not like we “50-somethings” used to be, but then we’re not like we used to be, either.

So, without further ado…

Millennial Myths and Realities