The Black Keys, a rock band out of Akron, is a hot commodity among twenty-somethings. The Keys played at the Value City Arena in Columbus Sunday night to a nearly full house.
My 23-year-old daughter and I went to the concert. My attention at the show was drawn more to the audience than the band. It had to be the quietest, most polite audience ever witnessing a rock ‘an’ roll show. They swayed gently and nodded their heads to the music and by and large seemed quite content. The attitude from this generation struck me as quite different from the over-30 crowd.
Clearly something new is going on with today’s youth. Brands are going to have to change strategies for reaching this generation. If they barely show any emotion for a rock band they truly enjoy, then what kind of enthusiasm will they show for brands selling automobiles, clothing or food products?
Some call this generation slackers. That description is used by people who don’t understand them. More do live at home than in the past. In 1960, 52 percent of men and 35 percent of women between the ages of 18-24 lived at home. Today, those numbers are 57 percent for men and 49 percent for women.
One reason for this change is that today’s generation is getting married later. Men marry now at 28.2 versus 22.8 in 1960. Women marry at 26.1 versus 20.3 in 1960.
Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a psychology professor at Clark University, Worchester, Mass., thinks he knows the reason for this new-attitude generation. He is leading a movement to declare the 20s as a distinct life stage called “emerging adulthood.”
Among the cultural changes he points to that have led to “emerging adulthood” are the need for more education to survive in an information-based economy; less of a need to marry because of the general acceptance of premarital sex; cohabitation and birth control; and young women holding off in having babies given their career options and the availability of assisted reproductive technology if they delay pregnancy beyond their most fertile years.
Gainful employment is another problem. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in January 2012 said that the unemployment rate for all workers over 16 was 9.1 percent. The unemployment rate for those over 25 was 7.6 percent.
Arnett says the emerging adulthood stage is a timeout from the daily grind of adult life. It gives younger people a chance to “develop skills for daily living, gain a better understanding of who they are and what they want from life and begin to build a foundation for their adult lives.”
If that is the case, then this emerging adulthood generation has a chance to be a more thoughtful, content and insightful generation than past ones. They are not rushing into life but trying to figure it out. If brands try and create a stampede of 20-somethings through dated marketing techniques, they should be prepared to get a lot of disinterested looks along with a few contented nods. The Black Keys concert showed that rock is still king. How the new generation responds to it has changed. Marketing will need to change as well to reflect the new personality of today’s emerging adults. John McGory is a partner at Webface, www.web-face-solutions.com . We are a content marketing and video company. We help our clients reach their customers in new and exciting ways. |
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