Understanding Baby Boomers

Generations X and Y are struggling to understand the Baby Boomer generation in much the way the Boomers tried to understand their parents and grandparents. The secret lies within the past pop-culture. Here is a video that explains the pop-culture during the early days of the Baby Boomers.
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Cell Phones on airplanes? a generational divide

Whether or not to allow cell phone usage on airplanes was the focus of a recent survey. The survey revealed that the tech-challenged Traditionalists and the Baby Boomer generation clearly want to keep the devices turned off and stowed during flights. However the Instant Messaging Generations X and Y are ready to end this ban.

Cell phones are banned on airplanes in flight due to the impact they would have on cell towers. With a high altitude plane a single cell phone could hit bounce it’s signal off hundreds of towers. However once a plane is in the final stages of landing their is no danger for their use according to many expert. The major pilot unions have continued to ask government authorities to ban there use anytime the plane’s door is closed is related to safety, not cell tower impact. They provide a distraction to the flight crew preventing the passengers, who are always riveted to any announcements being made, from clearly hearing them.

Generation X and Y, according to industry sources, will continue to have to sneak the IMs when the flight attendants are looking the other way.

Gen Y buying homes at a younger age

Generation Y is buying homes at a younger age than their predecessors in Generation X and the Baby Boomers. This, according to McClatchy Newspapers, is a result of the influences that have created an attitude among the generation that they deserve life’s rewards without paying their dues.

The generation is looking for modern, open space homes that are generally smaller than their parents’ homes, according to the newspaper.

The article failed to mention the fact that it is a buyer’s market with low home prices as potentially being a contributing factor.

Cracking down on boxers

Police in Flint, Michigan, and Lynwood, Illinois, are finally cracking down on crack. No, they are not attacking the illegal drug culture -- they are launching an all out war on generational cultures.

The Traditionalists are absolutely applauded by low pants. Baby Boomers also frown on the practice of showing boxers in public. Yet the Millennial Generation’s obsession amounts in their view to nothing more than a fashion statement.

In Lynwood anyone showing more than three inches of underwear is subject to a $25 fine. There is no mention of how sting underwear will be handled as it is often less than three inches in its entirety. Nor is there any indication of whether or not the normal folds or drape of the underwear is measured based on the drape or if it is stretched before measuring. If two officers are making the same observation, does one make the final call on the measurement or do they both, in which case we’d have a split decision.

In Flint it is more serious. Showing underwear is a warning. If the pants are below the, shall we say highest point of the crack, a ticket is issued that carries a fine. If starch was not used or the elastic is limp, the matter becomes much more serious as the police make a misdemeanor arrest, which could involved jail time.

Community decency standards are important, butt which crack is more important for the police to spend their time combating?

Teamwork falling victim to generational conflict

Teamwork in multi-generational workplaces is suffering from a lack of understanding how to communicate inter-generationally. According to Randstad, 66% of Traditionalists and 51% of Baby Boomers have little or no interaction with Gen X or Gen Y.

The Baby Boomers categorize younger workers as having less competence and work ethic while the Gen X and Yers feel the older folks are too set in their ways and cannot think outside of the box.

Companies not responding to this lack of communication risk a brain-drain as Baby Boomers head onto the retirement roles.

Many programs are successful at bridging the gap. One such program is Managing Builders, Boomers, Xs, and Ys without losing your Zs. It helps each generation understand how their culture was formed and how other generations view them. Mentoring programs are also generally successful when the mentor presents him or herself as an equal to the protégé, not a superior.

Employers believing the brain drain will not occur need only look to the struggle to get skilled workers as an example of what happens when tomorrow’s employees are not cultivated today.

Green Culture builds momentum

Thinking and acting green have been important to environmentalist culture for decades. Several other cultures are gaining strong green elements, including the Gen X and Millennial generations, the outdoor recreational culture, and the health conscious culture.

GlobeScan has just released their findings of a 14 country survey. In order from greenest to brownest are: Brazil, India, China, Mexico, Hungary, Russia, Great Britain, Germany, Australia, Spain, Japan, France, Canada, and USA.

The survey offset country size by randomly selecting 1,000 respondents from each. The survey considered only residents and looked at transportation, housing, and food purchasing habits.

Brazil and India gained high ratings because of small home size leading critics to claim that population crowding, a leading cause of housing size per capita, gave an unfair advantage instead of counting urban congestion against a country.

Love of job related to culture

A recent Harris Interactive poll has uncovered some cultural connections to one's feeling about their job.

• Generations: 53% of Baby Boomers love their job while only 37% of Generation X said they love their job. On the other hand, 19% of Generation X hate their job while only 7% of Baby Boomers claimed to hate their job.


• Marital: only 29% of those that have never been married love the job while 50% of those that are married love their job. When asked if they would like to immediately let, 24% of never-married employees said, “yes” as compared to only 9% of married employees.


• Regional: loyalty seems to increase as one moves to the west. In the Northeast only 39% love or like their job while 48% of those in Western states either love or like the job.


• Economic: 49% of employees paid at affluent levels ($75,000 in the survey) love their job while only 36% of those earning less than $35,000 love where they are working.

Millennial generation finds protest method

Protesting injustice has been a culturally defining and uniting aspect to each generation. For Baby Boomers it was the ever popular “sit-in”, to Millennials it’s a coin.

When Readington Middle School students had their lunch hour reduced to 30 minutes, they planned their penny protest. The protest involved paying for the $2 lunch with 200 pennies, meaning the school received 5,800 coins to count.

Twenty-nine students received two-day suspensions for the protest, however the suspensions were later dropped.

The students could have used the time to review the Coinage Act of 1965, section 31, U. S. C. 5103, which states the coins are a valid form of payment. The only exception is for private businesses which are permitted to limit the acceptance of certain monetary units. The school should also look at this law and put up signs saying “pennies not accepted” if they don’t want to accept them legally.

The end of a cultural icon: Polaroid Film

Polaroid has struck a tear with Builders and Baby Boomers when they announced the stoppage of film production. Unless another company buys the rights to make the film, it will cease to exist after next year.

Myth Debunked: The camera did not get it's popular name from its early days, Polaroid "Land" Camera, because the reflection of water prevented developing the film. It's monacker was due to the fact that inventor Edwin Land developed the process to polarize light on film.

In the early 1960s Eastman Kodak discovered the advantages to marketing specifically to the growing baby boomer generation. The Brownie Starmite camera was an affordable way for the builder generation to introduce their children to photography. Polaroid answered in the following decade with “The Swinger”. Bikini-clad Ali MacGraw showed how much fun it was to have a fully developed picture in only seconds. Best of all it sold for only $19.95, making it one the most affordable cameras Polaroid had ever made.

In the 1990s Polaroid survived, much to the surprise of many analysts, serious financial problems and the advent of the digital camera age. However even the instantaneous nature of Polaroid film and cameras cannot compete with even more instantaneous digital photography.

Time marches on and a generation that already said goodbye to revolutionary technology like the Sony Betamax, Vegomatic, Seal-a-Meal, 8-Track tapes, and Commadore 64 will say goodbye once again.

Play the Swinger commercial.

Don’t mess with my Whopper

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of its popular Whopper hamburger, Burger King launched the most successful ad campaign since “Have it your way” in the 1970s. They starting serving Wendy’s “Singles” or McDonald’s “Big Macs” to customers that ordered “Whoppers” in selected restaurants with hidden cameras. In some cases they just refused to sell the burger, saying it had been discontinued. The result is priceless footage of customers bitterly and vehemently complaining about the sandwiches demise.

The ad campaign struck a cultural nerve among baby boomers that grew up enjoying Whoppers and Whopper Juniors. The sentimental former Burger King patrons returned to reconnect to the taste of the Whopper, creating a double digit increase in sales for the comparable fourth quarter of 2007, despite the fact that the ad campaign only ran for 20 days during the quarter.

Burger King has learned that connecting to customers culturally will drive profit into the cash register. Here are just some of the cultures with which the ad campaign resonated.

• Baby Boomers. Touched a nostalgic nerve.


• Gen Y. This generation enjoys humorous advertising, particularly when pranks are involved. The ad was viewed over one-third million times on You Tube.
  
• Recreational/outdoor. A subtle link to an earlier, albeit less successful campaign, exploiting the broiled versus fried taste preference of the outdoor recreational culture.

Generations cope with writers strike

As with many other aspects of life, each generation is hoping with the writers strike in their own way:

• Builders/Traditionalists (born 1925-1944): watching network reruns.


• Baby Boomers (1943-1964): discovering cable alternatives.


• Gen X (1961-1980): still enjoying first run shows on cable.


• Gen Y (1977-2000): with MTV, MTV2, and VH1 they haven’t even noticed the strike.


• Millennials (1998-2012): Hannah Montana and other Disney and Nickelodeon hits are filmed a year in advance and You Tube doesn’t have reruns—therefore not effected.

Bridging cultures together in a campaign

Earlier this week, prominent members of the Kennedy family endorsed presidential bid of Senator Barack Obama. In doing so the Kennedys erected a bridge between the popular Generation Y candidate to the massive Baby Boomer electorate.

A simple endorsement would not have invoked the emotional foundation of the generational bridge. However both Caroline Kennedy and Ted Kennedy reminded the Baby Boomers of the days of Camelot.

Although baby boomers were too young to vote for President Kennedy they were well aware of the vision he had created for a new America. He had instilled hopes and dreams with then American hearts as he redefined the presidential image.

The key swing factor of 1960 presidential campaign was the use of television. Richard Nixon had a persona of the traditional stuffy politician. Yet Kennedy used the media to convey a friendly, human side. This image allowed him to speak directly to the hearts of Americans.

This is the same persona Obama worked to create. The message as well with Generation Y. However the Baby Boomers of the Democrat party were more likely to be supportive of Hillary Clinton. The words used as the Kennedy clan endorsed Obama created a bridge that Senator can now use to reach a new generation.

GM v. Toyota: Editor misses big story

The newspaper editor missed a big story by not reading his own newspaper.

His front page told about GM’s quest to stay number 1 in global automotive sales – a feat they pulled off by a mere 3,000 vehicles on a base of over 9 million new car deliveries. Meanwhile, the business section had a story about how GM and Toyota had also tied for customer loyalty awards.

Are these really unrelated stories – or are they a key factor in global business success?

The most significant number in the second story is the 63% rate at which GM drivers return to buy another car. The same rate is only 57% at Toyota. Seems like a small difference – think again, it is over a half-million cars. Had Toyota been as successful at customer retention, they easily would have been in first place.

The cultural aspect of customer retention

Every product and service lends itself to s specific cultural demographic. However cultures change as they grow and develop. For example, the interests of the Baby Boomers have gone from economy student car, to SUVs as the children grew, to more luxury features as the generation reached career goals.

Each country has also its own cultural factors to address. GM is rapidly growing in several nations where they have clearly keyed into the local needs and desires of prevalent automotive-buying cultures. That is why they were able to hold onto the top spot for at least one more year – despite predictions.

Oddly enough, in the 1970s it was companies like Toyota that taught GM this cultural lesson.

Gen Y can drive and talk at the same time

by Guillermo, MBC Staffer

It seems popular for lawmakers to want to make it illegal for people to use their cell phones while they drive. With a war in Iraq, genocide in Darfur, starving children in every country on the planet, recession, the rising cost of education, global warming, healthcare, nuclear Iran, the declining US dollar, and rising crude prices – is this really what we should be working on?

Perhaps talking on the cell phone for older people is a problem, it isn’t for Generation Y or X. Gens X and Y are masters of multitasking. Remember, Generation X mastered IMing while playing NeoPets while checking out the latest video on You Tube. Gen Y can text message, create a FaceBook, update an iPod, and visit friends on Runescape – all at the same time. (Note: to Baby Boomers, get your grandchildren to tell you what these things are.)

Obviously doing all that at the same time is much more complicated than talking on the phone behind the wheel of a speeding car – so give Xers and Yers a break!

If you want to talk about driver distraction, ask a Gen Yer to drive while oldies music is playing on the radio. It not a distraction – it’s a sleep inducer for Gen Y. Maybe there should be a law about that.

Face it Baby Boomers, X and Y have arrived

For the first time in their generation Baby Boomers are seeing their power waning. The generation that first experienced television was catapulted into power before most of the generation’s age had reached double digits. They did so on the strength of simple things like the Hula Hoop and Frisbee. Marketers like McDonald's learn they could move much more product by taking their message directly to the children, bypassing parents.

Baby Boomers were influential in ending the Vietnam War, beginning the suburban sprawl, and expanding individual homeownership. Through it all they assumed leadership in the business, educational, religious, and political arenas.

The Baby Boomer reign is over.

Last year several surveys showed that Baby Boomers were ready to hand over the reins of the business world. The results indicated the boomers want relief from the stress of business leadership, preferring to let the younger Generation X have a chance to fully develop the new contemporary management style. This is not just an American trend, it is happening throughout Europe and Asia as well.

The worldwide political scene is also experiencing this age shift in leadership. In December, Fidel Castro, who has been leader of Cuba for almost the entirety of the Baby Boomer's lifespan, was ready to turn over leadership to the younger generation.

In the United States, the recent Iowa caucus saw record numbers of Generations X and Y turning out to support candidate most exemplifying the desires and wishes of their generation. Most specifically, they desire to do away with the partisan battles that have stalemated our government. Other candidates are quickly redefining themselves to show they can also deliver what Generations X and Y are looking for: a fresh approach.