Once we know something, it becomes hard to imagine what it feels like not to know it.
More quotesMarketing has always been fascinated by young people, partly because young people are fascinating and partly because marketing departments contain lots of them.
That second reason is less often printed in the strategy.
The claim that today’s twenty-somethings reveal everybody’s tomorrow sounds clever until ageing enters the room. People who rent flats may later buy paint. People who spend Saturday outside may eventually discover gardening and regional crime dramas. Some behaviours belong to a generation; plenty belong to having no children, no mortgage and knees that tolerate nightclub stairs.
Meanwhile, the actual buyer becomes strangely invisible. A 56-year-old choosing a new car does not improve a mood board devoted to urban creators. The brand would rather court an imaginary future customer than notice the solvent one standing by the bonnet. Youth becomes a creative aesthetic masquerading as commercial foresight.
A shop can aim its entire window at “digital natives” while the queue inside consists of customers old enough to remember dial-up, all paying without assistance. Reality conducts excellent research through the glass. Nobody takes notes.
None of this means ignore younger buyers. It means stop treating age as destiny. Separate the things people do because they are 24 from the things this particular cohort may still do at 54. Then look at revenue rather than the agency casting sheet.
Society as it is now may lack the glamour of society in a trend deck. It has one vulgar advantage: it can buy things today.