NEW YORK (MainStreet) — If there’s one thing marketers are dying to figure out, it’s the Millennials. By now, this demographic, also known as Generation Y, has become the crucial young adult cohort that buys everything from video games to houses. They have money to spend and unprecedented new ways to spend it. Depending on who you talk to, the Millennials are engaged or apathetic, go-getters or entitled crybabies. Its members make up the first generation to brag about free labor on our resumes, and came of age alongside the Internet. In other words, while no one knows quite what to make of this generation endless, amounts of ink have been spilled in the effort. Sometimes with disastrous results. Digital marketing firm Exponential took the latest stab at figuring Gen Y out and announced its results at Advertising Week in New York City. According to industry newspaper Ad Week, Exponential's vice president of research Bryan Melmed and his team surveyed over 4 million adults age 18 – 34 and gauged their reactions to three main issues: the economy, globalization and social media. The upshot is that this generation -- the one invading your office space and neighborhood -- comes in 12 distinct varieties: 1. The Boss Babe The Type: Confident, career-minded women. These are the aggressive, ambitious Millennial women. They put their careers first with time for family later and generally have a lot of money to spend. 2. The Brogrammer The Type: Hard partying tech guys. These are the engineering majors at your local frat house. Defying stereotypes the lonely, sexless nerd, the brogrammer loves football as much as Perl and knows his way around a sports bar. 3. The Underemployed The Type: Recent grads still trying to get their careers off the ground. The underemployed tend to be overeducated for their job and often frustrated by their lack of momentum. They’re not down and out, but pretty close to it. 4. Shut Outs The Type: Unemployed with few projects. Shut-out Millennials either have no college education or a degree they can’t use. They can’t find a decent job and may never fully make up for the lost ground. 5. Nostalgics The Type: Hipsters. The nostalgics are fascinated with trends and fashions from decades past. They listen to LPs, drink liquor from the 40’s and glorify the days of someone else’s youth. 6. Travel Enthusiasts The Type: Generally well-educated globe trotters (such as yours truly). Travel enthusiasts are frugal, adventurous travel types. They are still sleeping in hostels at 30, and while they have options, they’ve generally put career and family on hold to see the world. 7. Culinary Explorers The Type: Adventurous foodies. You’ll find the culinary explorer raving about everything from haute cuisine to the latest street carts. They’re adventurous personalities and express that through food. 8. The Exuberants The Type: Image conscious social media creators. You know that friend who tweets every 15 minutes, Snap Chats all life events and never, ever, ever misses a date with Facebook? Those are the exuberants. 9. The Collectors The Type: Constantly on social media but rarely posts. Collectors loves pop culture and browses social media all the time, but they are generally introverted personalities who rarely create content themselves. 10. The Quarter-Life Crisis The Type: Millennials paralyzed by too many choices. Unable to choose among options, these young adults tend not to make any major choices at all. They dabble instead of committing, and are likely to spend their 20s always on the edge of decisions. 11. The Millennial Marthas The Type: Crafty, do-it-yourselfers A Millennial Martha can make even her tiny Brooklyn apartment charming and quaint. These types are crafty, clever and generally heavy social media users who like to share their projects with the world. 12. Millennial Moms The Type: Young parents Fit, active and socially conscious young mothers. They have money to spend and often try to balance work and family to a far greater degree than generations past. According to Margot Bogue, senior vice president of Brand Planning with advertising agency Cramer-Krasselt, one of the most important aspect of Millennials also makes them the hardest to pin down: raw size. The Millennials are the single largest generation in history at almost 74 million people large. That makes segmentations like this important, because advertisers just can’t talk to that many people at once. All while trying to reach a profoundly different audience. “If you think about it, in terms of how Millennials are approaching things, their world is different,” Bogue said. “You have a post-Obama world. You have social media. It’s post 9-11, post Columbine, post Sandy Hook. Gay marriage is more accepted than it was years ago. There are just so many things that are different. “You’ll hear people say that this is the most multicultural generation ever, but you’ll also hear people say that this is the most multicultural group of adults, because the generation below them is even more multicultural. So what’s interesting about Millennials is that they are a pivot generation.” Segmentation, like Exponential’s 12 categories, is important for advertisers. It lets them tailor specific messages that can reach the relevant people. (Consider how Axe Body Spray commercials appeal to the deepest fantasies of adolescent males and absolutely nobody else.) The odd thing about Exponential’s demographics, though, is how completely normal they seem. According to Bogue, for a generation defined by new technology and groundbreaking social change, we look… well, a lot like our parents. “My biggest takeaway, while I find it entertaining and interesting how they’ve grouped different people, I didn’t find any groups that are different from Gen X or Boomers,” Bogue said. “If you look at boss babes, you could say Marissa Mayer is a boss babe, and those are not any different with Boomers.” Just as there have always been shut outs, the underemployed and travel bums, Brogrammers will probably see themselves in Revenge of the Nerds and Millennial Marthas even have a generational namesake. “Are they suggesting that the Millennials as a whole may be different?" Bogue said. "They’re reshaping the rules and all that, but when you dig down into the segmentations they’re really not all that different from gen x and boomers?” --Written for MainStreet by Eric Reed, a freelance journalist who writes frequently on the subjects of career and travel. You can read more of his work at his website http://ift.tt/1dOgcI0.
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