“Millennials are Wrinkling” and Other Signs of Maturity in Marketing to Gen Y

Dog, yes, use a dog photo, or a cat, they like that.

It used to be “the millennials are coming.” 

Today it’s “the millennials are wrinkling.” 

Before we reach “the millennials are retiring,” now is the time to reframe the conversations you’re having about this not-so-mysterious age bracket, also known as Generation Y.

This Digiday article by Tanya Dua, features how the Perricone MD skincare brand is engaging a younger — but indeed aging — audience through new channels and increased investments in digital marketing spend and talent.

Per the article and according to the NPD Group, Inc., “In particular, NPD found that millennial consumers are most likely to seek products with “doctor endorsements and natural ingredients.” Older consumers apparently just let it rip with whatever….”

The headline caught my eye, as this article is insightful in its own right with lifestyle brands reigning supreme through social and digital means, while also serving as a microcosm of the larger conversation on reaching millennials (who also happen to be the largest group in our workforce).

In Perspective

Perhaps we should be all more concerned with the natural loss of elasticity in our faces, necks and hands. 

Frankly, and like I imagine the majority of my peers, I’m more consumed in understanding the sources of stress that are causing these worry lines.

• Career: Finding gainful employment, making the right decisions toward advancement with a career path, and then making the right decisions repeatedly when you are put into positions of leadership and influence. 

• Family: Managing life as parents to growing families and health concerns therein, and/or as caregivers to aging parents and relatives.

• Financial: Major purchasing decisions, student loans, future financial security, life insurance, education planning for your kids, planning for charitable giving. 

• Personal Enterprise. Launching, protecting, promoting one’s startup business, side hustle or social enterprise.

• Philanthropy: Balancing time to enable contributions to community, civic and other charitable endeavors. 

• Sweating the Big Stuff: World affairs, economic conditions, human rights, etc.

Do you, your product, or your service deliver hope to the omnipresent fears of this generation?

Do you employ, or intend to employ digital or mobile marketing tactics to deliver your message?

We can all agree that it takes more than a directive to start “Twittering,” or find college students that know how “to Facebook.” 

Reaching this blanket audience, who apply the verb filter to every second of the day, is no small task, especially if you aren’t a lifestyle brand with decades of loyal customers to back you up. 

In Christopher Penn’s Top Marketing Skills of 2017 post, he lays out conditions leading to less effectiveness in marketing efforts.

Penn shares: 

• SEO (search engine optimization) is progressively more and more difficult with the flood of new content.

• Unpaid social media reach is a bad joke now.

• Paid social media reach is expensive.

• PPC and display clickthrough rates are an equally bad joke.

He goes on to share what will be important, including cloud/distributed computing, software integration, mobile development, data presentation and more. Read the full post if you dare.  

For some, this future state of marketing and access is a reality; for many, it’s a vision or foundation of a five-year plan being wielded as we speak (you know, to be revisited when the first millennials start hitting the big 4-0).  

However, you need not be as discouraged as the data suggests. Start by having more adult conversations about connecting this rapidly maturing audience.

For instance:

• Redefine Your Meaning of the Word Friend: Friends today aren’t just your college buddies (which to whom I’ll bet you’re grateful that we all didn’t have Facebook back in the day). Friends can start out as mutual connections on LinkedIn, forged via social media conversations alone, or in the least nurtured overtime after a real-life interaction. Acceptable social behavior changes with each passing swipe, so take advantage of connecting, or reconnecting, with more friends than you thought you could have. 

• Be Obsessively Thoughtful at the Personal Branding Level: Permitting — and promoting -- your employees, teams and leaders to develop their personal brands and engaging outside the confines of your style guides comes with both risk and reward. It’s likely happening anyway, so choose to be the example in how to do thought leadership right, and how to protect themselves and your brand through the process. 

• Think Big, Spend Smart: You can quickly create a brand presence just about anywhere through digital means, but you must be picky on where you choose to spend your time on engagement, and your marketing budget to boost visibility. IMPORTANT: this includes your strategy regarding customer/prospect data analytics and intelligence, corporate websites, mobile marketing and app development, and social media platforms. You might need it all, but you can’t do it all at once. 

In Reflection 

For myself, technically a member of Gen Y this whole time, the need for a different mindset didn’t hit home until I started seeing those in my college graduating class and peer networks attaining powerful decision-making roles: for both their organizations, or for businesses they had launched and grown. 

Until then I’d been focused on influencing those of generations before me to take digital marketing ideas and innovations seriously. It takes less convincing today.

​Now, with our generation looking our mutual crows’ feet in the eye, my sights are turned toward understanding the new generation entering the workforce, and how we will work together. 

Now will someone teach me how to do a Snapchat face swap with my high school yearbook photo already? 


More on Millennial Marketing: 

The struggle is real: Marketing to Millennials: MarketingLand

8 tips for marketing to millennials online: CIO

What Marketers Need to Know About Millennials in 2016: AMA.org

6 Things To Know About Marketing To Millennials: Forbes.com



Christina Capadona-Schmitz (@ChristinaCS & @DownWithSpitUp) leads marketing communications for Oswald Companies, a risk management and financial services company in Cleveland, Ohio. She is on the clock 24/7 with her parenting resource blog www.DownWithSpitUp.com, among other creative pursuits and community endeavors. Connect with her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinacapadonaschmitz.