Thursday, April 19, 2012

Segmenting Gen Y- do you know this Millennial?


One of the first steps in identifying a target is to establish age range.  But there are still many different types of people within each generation.  A recent study by Boston Consulting Group has identified six distinct groups within Gen Y.  They are:

1. Hip-ennials (29%): cautious consumers, hungry for information, students and homemakers, predominately female.

2. Millennial Moms (22%): older, most affluent, online intensive, committed to working out, traveling, and pampering their children.

3. Anti-Millennials (16%): conservative, won’t spend more for green products, and are too busy worrying about themselves to care about anyone else.

4. Gadget Gurus (13%): affluent, single, wired, and mostly male.

5. Clean and Mean Millennials (10%): cause-driven, green, younger, most likely to contribute content, more likely to be male or Hispanic.

6. Old School Millennials (10%): less tech involved, read the most, older, confident, optimistic, would rather meet friends for coffee than on Facebook.
(Mahoney, 2012)

What surprises you most about these findings?  Is it how few Gen Yers are actually green?  Or the fact that any of them like to read?


Mahoney, S. (2121, April 16) Gen Y Dissected: Six Types Of Millennials.  mediapost.com  Retrieved April 19, 2012, from

2 comments:

ashley said...

First of all, I’d like to point out that I think doing these subcategories can help a lot to the advertiser since it narrows down even more the target.

The thing that surprised me the most was that a few Gen Yers want to meet their friends for coffee. I know this generation is a generation of younger people who were, mostly, born with the technology, but still we always need human interaction.

Another thing that caught my attention is that the 22% who are moms are the ones who work out, and they are probably the busiest ones.

Vicky K said...

After reading this article, its clear that it is impossible to choose our target and direct the marketing plan based on generation facts, because all of this subcategories show us that even though all of them are part of Gen Y, they might be completely different. if we have a product targeted to Gen Y, we have to reach anti-millenials on a different way than how we reach clean and mean millenials.

Also, the classifications are so opposite that we can never generalize Gen Y as a whole classification. They are extremists, either they are green or they hate green, either they like technology or they don't.

What also caught my attention is that the first two groups: Hip-ennials and Millenial moms have the highest percentage and they are predominantly female. Does this mean that Gen Y is conformed mostly by females?