In this Expert Insight Interview, Mary Ann Pruitt discusses generational marketing and how to market to each generation separately. Mary Ann Pruitt started her career in media working as a Senior Sales Executive at some of the largest national media outlets. She founded Mosaic to provide niche expertise and experience to agencies and marketing departments across the country.
This Expert Insight Interview discusses:
- The record-wide age range of the American workforce
- How to market to all these different generations
- The major shift in consumer behavior over the last 18 months
Five Generations in the Workforce
We have more generations in the workforce than ever before. For the first time in American history, we have five generations in the workforce, which means five different generations have a high spending capability and spending power. We have never had that before at the capacity that we have now.
This makes this period in American history unique. We’re actually on the cusp of having six working generations, with traditionalists and baby boomers choosing not to retire and the teenagers headed into the demographic as well.
Finding the Ideal Customer
The wide age range of the potential customer pool is a massive challenge for many organizations, particularly if your product or service isn’t targeted at a particular age group. So, how do you market when all of these different generations like to receive information in very different ways?
It is all about getting back to the basics of your ideal customer and who you’re ideally targeting. We used to be able to go broad with our demographics, simply dividing them into 30-year-wide age groups. Today, the data we collect on customers is a lot more nuanced, targeting very specific groups.
Effect of the Pandemic
So, are there very distinct traits helping you market to different generations? Over the last 18 months, we’ve seen consumer behavior shift, and we’ve learned quite a lot about the different generations of consumers.
There’s a multi-fold tide happening in the shift of behavior. The evolution of social media consumption that should have taken the older generation a decade occurred overnight. Everybody over the age of 60 was suddenly on social media, while the younger generation turned more and more to traditional media. This all resulted in massive changes in how we market to these demographics.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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