My clients and my peers are all trying to learn as much as they can about how to engage the new workforce as employees and as customers.
It seems as if no other generation has generated such mystique…sure, you can say that the Boomers found the X’ers perplexing and the same with X’ers and Y’s. But I venture to say that this newest, LARGEST generation is causing much more head scratching than the ones before.
The graphic below from UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School gives a good view of the landscape of the generations that are co-existing at work right now.
There are more people of different generations juggling for their place in the workplace than ever before. Due to economic stresses over the past 5 years, people in the older generations that would have been exiting due to retirement are staying in the workforce longer after losing significant portions of their retirement during the stock market dips. Millennials & Management is a great book by Lee Caraher, which offers some great tips about how to manage these generational differences.
And as for the marketing world, marketers are quite perplexed about not only how to appeal to, but actually how to COMMUNICATE with the newest consumers. Some tips that I gleaned about how to market to millennials from VisionCritical:
Here are some best practices when marketing to millennials:
- Create experiences.
- Support causes that are important to them.
- Provide variety and customization.
- Check your assumptions.
- Let them engage with each other.
- Create a long-term relationship.
These same tips have implications on how to engage millennials to participate in research. We have been experimenting with how to offer incentives that appeal to them (think ‘exclusive access’ and ‘supporting their favorite charities’) as well as what kind of research methodologies work best (think ‘social’, ‘online’, and ‘asynchronous’). This is a constantly evolving area of experimentation. Exciting stuff!
What is YOUR experience with engaging millennials either as employees or as customers? We can all learn from one another…