MILLENNIAL MADNESS

I was at a management conference in Croatia last week in an out-of-season luxury hotel overlooking a sun-drenched sea. There was, predictably, little sleep, some hard work and a few moments of drama. These revolved around debate on the pace of change technologically and socio-demographically.

Those of you who know me will be unsurprised by my enthusiastic support for the young, their attitudes and their behaviour. Equally I prefer looking forwards to backwards. Unlike most of my generation I was born with a defective nostalgia muscle. I just don’t do yearning for the glorious past when our trains were driven by steam and we smoked Sobranie cigarettes.

Today is better and the future will be better still.

But that future is here right now according to a presentation given by a bright, charming millennial about the life of his generation.  It’s all social media, instant messaging and a happy, pastel world of good intentions. In my own past we had Howard Marks, the self-styled Mr Nice, and mind-beautifying drugs. Plus ça change… only the mind altering tools are now online.

A few months ago Simon Sinek spoke provocatively about millennials. He described them as having a huge sense of entitlement and impatience. Their life he said was one of instant gratification, a “me-now” society and is founded on a belief that they can do anything, achieve anything and that this delusion is the result of bad, indulgent parenting.

As my mother used to say to me when I was tiny “life is real and life is earnest” which given V2 super-bombs had shortly before been screaming out of the sky above us was reasonable. Life was not a barrel of laughs for sure.

But it’s still quite tough. Most companies are not like Advertising Agencies, Google or Apple designed to engage the millennial workers. Most companies are quite serious places where getting to the top is like climbing a difficult mountain. There are no quick fixes.  Distraught by their failure to understand the Millennials many companies are asking them what they really want.

Sinek reports:
“They reply ‘to be in a place with purpose, to make an impact and to have ….free food and beanbags.’ But when you give them all that they still aren’t happy.”

The very tools being praised so highly at the conference, various forms of social media, are part of the problem. Research shows the more time spent on Facebook the more likely people are to be depressed. For many mobile phones are an addiction as bad as excessive drinking or gambling.  And as the recent furore at Google shows all is not entirely sunny in this hallowed territory. Indeed the decline in social media is on the verge of seeing off some pillar brands like Twitter.

Millennials are to be taken seriously but not so seriously we allow them primary authorship of the strategies we set and the societies we create.

Above all they need our help and understanding not our blind worship.

THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN

(but who are these people?)

I had lunch with old University friends last week. All had held senior positions in government, law or business. They were urbane and charming and just the sort of “elite” many people on ‘Question Time’ in Wakefield last Thursday. detest.

But several of my friends disagreed with me. I was regarded as a naïve romantic for speaking in praise of what are described as the millennials. These are defined as the 16 million reaching young adulthood in the year 2000.

We used to think we knew what all sorts of “the people” thought and why they thought it. We used to think mass marketing worked. We trusted in our data.

And here’s what the ex-Chief Marketing Officer from Mars said:
“I’m not a great believer in targeting. Our target is about 7 billion people sitting on this planet. Out task is to reach as many people as we can; to get them to notice us and remember us; to nudge them; and get them to buy us once more this year.”

Not believing in targeting is as extraordinary as golfer Justin Rose saying “I’m not a great believer in putting.”
Because as recent events show people aren’t as the pundits suppose them. They are very diverse, opinionated and influenced increasingly by feelings rather than logic.

To judge from the alarmingly articulate vitriol in Wakefield this is a world where supposedly ignored and ignorant people are fighting back and sweeping the smart elite away. And the day after Wakefield, Zac Goldsmith’s 23,000 majority was astonishingly demolished in the Richmond by-election.   So do any of us think that we currently really understand or empathise with each other? Certainly not when 70 year olds talk about Facebook and Jay Z with such bewildered contempt and when the millennials believe most of the older cohort betrayed them in the UK and in the USA by voting the way they recently did.

We’re deaf to the way voters, consumers or ordinary people think especially if we underestimate them.
This is a world where single issue campaigns like “the economy stupid” - (Bill Clinton 1992) or “Project Fear” (Lynton Crosby 2016) won’t wash anymore. Arguments now need to be diverse, reactive and fast/ More spontaneous and less crafted.

It’s a world where “the people” as an amorphous mass has ceased to exist.

Wakefield was frighteningly angrily vocal. This wasn’t a debate so much as a revolution about past slights. They would have torn my University friends limb from limb had they been there.  Marketing anything, whether a candidate or a brand, is going to get harder. We’re flying blind.

Our best hope is our youth because the best young people seem smarter and nicer than ever we were. I can’t wait for them to be in charge because they see the world as it is and as it will be, not as it was.
Because they are the future and my friends and Wakefield are the past.