Recently, I’ve been thinking about the usefulness of naming generational groups of people. Then, I saw David Wolfe's four-part post on Generational Nonsense (part: 1, 2, 3, 4).
It seems trendy to use phrases like Gen Y and Generation Next in the boardroom. But what does it really mean to generalize a whole group of people? It scares me to hear business people say Gen Yers are like this and Gen Xers are like that. They think they know their target audience. But do they?
Here’s a great quote by Bill Bernbach (via David Wolfe):
“Human nature hasn’t changed for a million years. It won’t even change in the next million years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about the changing man. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man – what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him.”
Comments