Maybe you recall Strother Martin's pained, twisted line of dialogue spoken to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, delivered after Martin has struck chain-gang prisoner Newman with a blackjack: "What we've got here is failure to communicate."
I thought of this line after seeing the story making the rounds yesterday that British millennials check their mobile devices every nine minutes and 50 seconds. This kind of data and story promotes the concept that millennials are an entirely different species of human, and insinuates that they're unfocused, difficult to manage, flighty and much more addicted to technology than the rest of us.
The failure to communicate with millennials—from both the brand and personal perspectives—stems not from what makes them different from the rest of the population, but from assumptions based on anecdotal evidence, bite-size statistics and generational resentment. It's the old saw: "These kids today, they want everything handed to them on a silver platter—we never had it so good."
First, about the stats making the rounds yesterday: They sprang from a U.K. Daily Mail story that quoted a study conducted by a "customer service solutions" company called KANA, which has certainly succeeded in getting its name out there. Are its findings telling? Perhaps, but it's too easy to take its showcase stat about 18-to-24-year-olds out of context. I know this is anecdotal on my part, but it seems to me that we're all hopelessly addicted to our mobile devices.
"Millennials are people, not 'a people,'" says Jake Katz, VP, audience insights & strategy for music-focused TV network Revolt. "Behaviorally, they are more similar than different to other generations," says Katz, who will be keynoting PR News' Digital PR Summit in San Francisco on Feb. 5, and who was formerly general manager of Ypulse, a youth market research firm.
For brands, the first step to communicating with millennials, according to Katz, is to discard the popular myth that they are massively different from everybody else, and pivot from thinking about what they are to how to communicate with the many different geographical and age ranges within the millennial demographic.
It's time to lay the proverbial generational blackjack to rest and begin the real work of learning about the people around you—on a business and personal level.
—Steve Goldstein
@SGoldsteinAI