Talking About Their Generation (III)

Previously, on Praxis . . . Come on -- didn't our staff MAs understand that Sachs was just reporting on tendencies among this segment? That "more likely than" is understood in all of this? That they were using marketing shorthand to make the presentation more powerful? That the people in the clips don't necessarily represent all MAs?

Well, we've already gotten some thought-provoking answers to these questions from Sarah Floyd, Nikki Lavoie, and Amy Barry. Maybe the whole "tendency" issue is not the point. If they saw this as (to put it kindly) pigeonholing their entire generation, and if they took some offense to being pigeonholed, could you blame them? (By the way, ask any member of selected racial or ethnic groups in this country how they feel about attempts to describe them in broad, general terms. Odds are the term they'd use isn't as kind as "pigeonhole.")

But to think of this as primarily an emotional, visceral reaction to pigeonholing is to miss an important point. The fact that our MAs felt they had nothing in common with the people in the clips may say something about the relative value, or lack of value, of research that ends up offering broad generalizations about a diverse generational group. Do these initiatives help at all? Or, by missing the nuances and the diversity that are necessarily part of any consumer segment, are they limited to simply stating the obvious?

That's not an easy question to answer, but this might help: Several weeks ago, The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a fascinating feature story about Netflix. It turns out that for several years, Netflix has been looking into ways to improve the accuracy of its movie recommendation feature -- "if you liked this movie, you'll also like this one." As part of this effort, the company established a contest, open to any data geek who might be interested. The first person, or team of people, to create a statistical model that improves the accuracy of the current recommendation system by at least 10% wins a million dollars.

All of the teams are using Netflix customers' past ratings of movies to predict how those same customers would rate other movies. You might think that demographic characteristics would play a role -- gender, age, generational group, etc. But here's the surprising part:

• "Interestingly, the Netflix Prize competitors do not know anything about the demographics of the customers whose taste they're trying to predict. The teams sometimes argue on the discussion board about whether their predictions would be better if they knew that customer No. 465 is, for example, a 23-year-old woman in Arizona. Yet most of the leading teams say that personal information is not very useful, because it's too crude. As one team pointed out to me, the fact that I'm a 40-year-old West Village resident is not very predictive. There's little reason to think the other 40-year-old men on my block enjoy the same movies as I do. . . . Even though Net¬flix has a good deal of demographic information about its users, the company does not currently use it much to generate movie recommendations; merely knowing who people are, paradoxically, isn't very predictive of their movie tastes." The New York Times Sunday Magazine, November 23, 2008.

So, if you ask me (and I would tell you even if you didn't ask, so don't go anywhere yet), I'd say our MillenniAdults' reactions do provide important lessons about the limitations of studies that attempt to describe the common characteristics of a generational segment: that these studies can't capture the diversity and nuance inherent in a generation, that sweeping generalizations do little more than state the obvious, and that it's misleading at best -- and offensive at worst -- to confuse tendencies with absolutes. And most important, their reactions remind us that when you notice any of this in a generational study, the results need to be taken with a big grain of salt.

For myself, I continue to believe in the value of studies that profile a consumer segment -- as long as everyone involved clearly understands what they can and cannot do. Where they work best (concrete, behavioral, and contextual) and where they can fall short (broadly attitudinal and absolute).

But my feeling about all of this shouldn't surprise anyone. I'm a Baby Boomer, after all. I just went online, and it says I'm "adaptive" and have a "positive attitude."

Wait, isn't that what someone said about Millennials?