• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, October 7, 2001

An article by Pamela Paul, in the September issue of American Demographics, provides an excellent marketer’s perspective on the nation’s 71 million Gen Y’rs. She says that these Echo Boomers are the next big generation, an enormously powerful group that has the sheer numbers to transform every life stage it enters—just as its parents generation did. And businesses in nearly every consumer spending category are jockeying for a piece of this market.

J. Walker Smith, president of Yankelovich, says that an umbrella definition of a generation doesn’t always makes sense. Gen Y’s parents, the nation’s 78 million Baby Boomers, were classified by Yankelovich in three subgroups: Leading Edge (those born between 1946 and 1950), Core (born between 1951 and 1959) and Trailing Boomers (born between 1960 and 1964).

American Demographics found that Gen Y can also be looked at in terms of three distinct age groups. They report that the U.S. Census Bureau defines GenY as those born between the years 1977 and 1994. 36% of this generation will be between the ages of 18 and 24 this year. 34% are teens, currently 12- to 17-years-old, and 30% are pre-pubescent "’tweens," ranging in age from 7 to 11 this year.

Of significant importance to marketers planning media selections to reach these Echo Boomers, the report states that MTV is as natural and ubiquitous as the Big Three Networks were for the generations before them.

In a spring 2001 Lifestyle and Media poll of 1,200 college students, MTV was by far the favorite cable channel, with 39% of students calling it their top choice. The influence of MTV on all kinds of media, especially those created by or targeted to this younger demographic has been dramatic, reports demographer Susan Mitchell.

Mitchell concludes that MTV has created a propensity toward a type of visual style that speaks specifically and effectively to Gen Ys: loud graphics, rapid edits, moving cameras.

You can read more here.