Mindset List gives glimpse into millennials’ consumer habits

Millennials come to a brand “when they’re ready,” says List pioneer

Marketing

By Allie Sanchez

Marketers puzzling over millennials may find a way out of their conundrum with the most recent Beloit College Mindset List, as reported by the American Marketing Association (AMA) in its online publication.

“Many people understand that millennials really like authenticity. They don’t like phonies. But trying to figure out what is authentic is very hard,” Tom McBride, a retired professor of English and pioneer of the Mindset List, said in the AMA report.

The market is potentially huge, McBride also noted. “There are about 70 million millennials right now, and if each of them over their lifetime spends a million dollars commercially, that’s $70 trillion. That’s a lot of money,” he added.

He further contrasts millennials with boomers, whom he likens to dogs. “In terms of marketing, we were dogs,” McBride, a boomer himself, observed. “But these millennials, they’re cats. They come to you on the internet.”

“When they’re ready,” added Ron Nief, director of public affairs at Beloit College, and another pioneer of the list.

“If you’re going to market to this particular demographic cohort, you might have to learn stuff that is very unique to them, and make references that are quite unique to them. There are probably a lot of parallel cultures around
this country. For all of the internet connections we have, we are, in many ways, in these different cultural and demographic channels,” McBride also noted.

“This is a nation that now lacks that kind of central cultural authority. Everything is up for grabs in terms of multiculturalism, diversity, identity politics and so forth and so on. …  I don’t think we should be surprised that e pluribus unum doesn’t work the way it used to.”


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