Four Reasons to Love GenY

Whether you’re a nonprofit or a corporation, it’s time to wake up and embrace the new world we live in where people born between 1979 and 2000, or Generation Y, are changing the rules of branding and, well, everything else.

1. They love to shop. They appreciate quality and are willing to spend for it.
Many GenYers believe they are immune to advertising tactics and are knowledgeable about brands. This makes them perhaps more fickle but just as engaged with brands and less leery of the negative aspects of advertising. A Keller Fay Group study indicated that teenagers have, on average, 145 conversations about brands a week. Twice as many as adults do.

2. They influence their family’s buying choices.
Millennials enjoy close relationships with their parents who, in general, are more knowledgeable about children and less strict than their own parents were. GenYers are loved and grow up certain that they can achieve great things. This confidence and complicity with their parents gives them great power in the household.

3. They are gregarious and communicate often through technology.
GenYers, as we all know, are adept at using social media—though texting remains their medium of choice—and, even offline, tend to travel in packs (see Apple or Abercrombie & Fitch stores for compelling proof of this). In both off- and on-line interactions there are “influencers” who, if privy to the right information, can have great impact on getting the word out about a product or an initiative. Millennials don’t differentiate between a physical store and an online presence, making it crucial for brands to perform well in both realms.

4. They, as their Baby Boomer predecessors, believe they can and should change the world for the better. Despite older generations’ fears that the Internet might have negative effects on our cognitive abilities, it seems Millennials are as socially engaged as their older counterparts. As shopping is a tool for expressing their individuality, so choosing to support brands who visibly care about social and environmental causes give GenYers reason to feel good about themselves. The empowerment they’ve been made to feel by their loving parents and the unprecedented clout they enjoy in the world—it’s decidedly cool to be young right now—bode well for our future if Millennials opt to use it to effect change.