Follow-up Archive

April 18, 2007

Connecting with Generation Y
by Sarah Reinwald Guldalian

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With the excess generational marketing we are bombarded with, it's easy to get confused: Whose who? Let me introduce you to Generation Y. Generation Y is constituted of those born between 1982 and 1995: ages 12 to 24. The oldest are recently out of college. The youngest are still in grade school. And, there are nearly 80 million of them. Generation Y has become the most dominant generation of Americans since the baby boomers (60 million) who happen to be their parents.

If you have wondered why the culture is centered on today's youth, it's because this youth generation already spends $170 billion a year of their own and their parents' money. What matters to them matters to existing and upcoming corporations, if they want to stay in business, that is. And, what vacates their pocket books is everything digital.

They are sometimes known as the "Echo Boomers" or the "Millennium Generation." These kids are heavily immersed in a digital world. They are considered multi-taskers not only because of their diverse digital resources - razr cell phones, iPods, MySpace, music downloading and instant messaging - but because they have the know-how to design their own websites and blog pages - all at once - web degree or not. This is the first group to be raised in a classroom full of computers. And, because of their digital knowledge and beyond, they consider themselves elite, "special" in fact.

"They are more protected," says Historian Neil Howe. "They regard themselves as collectively special, because of the time in which they were raised. They came along at a time when we started re-valuing kids. During the '60s and '70s, the frontier of reproductive medicine was contraception," says Howe. "During the '80s and beyond, it's been fertility and scouring the world to find orphan kids that we can adopt. ...The culture looked down on kids. Now it wants kids; it celebrates them."

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