From the Millenial Marketing Blog: Gen Y are Harry Potter and Boomers are Professor Snipe...

Written by: Carol Phillips

Millennials vs. Boomers: Hogwarts as Metaphor?

I highly recommend Millennial Makeover by Winograd and Hais (Rutgers Press, 2008). While the focus is political, there is plenty of useful data for marketers, much of it from familiar sources like Pew (see previous blog post). My reason for recommending it, however, is their use of the data to address the question, 'Are Millennials just younger versions of previous generations or are they really different'? The arguments they put forth are compelling. According to the authors

"... media moguls, authors and even politicians make the fundamental error of thinking that today's young people think and act just like they did when they were young. Nothing could be further from the truth." They ask us to think of Millennials as a generational cohort made up solely of Harry Potter and his plucky friends, and to contrast them with the adults at Hogwarts, the scowling, often clueless faculty and ministry of magic administrators. While Harry and his team (key word) work hard to save the world, applying special ingenuity and talents, the grown ups they must contend with are "individualistic, judgmental egotists who talk more than they act."

Millennial professionals who participated in two online focus groups, to our surprise, expressed a similar view of Boomers. When asked who they prefer to work with, all said they preferred to work with other Millennials (no surprise there), and they MUCH prefer to work for Gen X'ers over Boomers. This was indeed a big surprise to us, after all that has been written about the supposed natural affinity between Millennials and Boomers. Boomers are considered to be like their parents, pretty old fashioned and out of touch. One young brand manager at Unilever even shared with us that there is a 'reverse mentoring' program in place at his company, where Millennials share their technology wizardry insights with older, less adept Boomers. In contrast, they feel as if they have more to learn from Gen X'ers and that X'ers are more willing to take the time to teach them what they need to know.