Modern Marketing for Emerging Adults
The NY Times recently published an article about a psychology professor’s attempt to gain professional consensus around a new life stage called “emerging adults.” According to this professor, Jeffrey Arnett, “emerging adults” those who are between the age of 18 and the late 20s; a period in life when people are too old to be considered adolescents, but too young to be considered adults. Or as Jeff Buckley once elegantly lamented, “Too young to hold on and too old just to break free and run.”
The psychological profile of emerging adults is marked by “identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and a rather poetic characteristic [Arnett] calls ‘a sense of possibilities.’” Should this life stage be fully adopted by the professional and academic community, we may see policy changes in healthcare, education and social services sometime in our future, but there are real implications for marketers now.
As a result of this psychological profile, emerging adults “slouch toward adulthood at an uneven, highly individual pace.” For marketers, this means age alone can’t be used as a means to target. People in this age group reach traditional milestones at different times. “In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones [completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child]. Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so.”
As we noted in our paper, The impact of today’s financial crisis on Generation Y, published in early 2009, “the needs of a 25-year-old who is single living in NYC has vastly different needs from a married 25-year-old with a young child at home.”
Thankfully, today’s media options allow for more acute and accurate targeting based on psychographics. Furthermore, it provides greater credence to leverage social media when addressing this audience; as social media provides brands with the opportunity to curate, create and encourage user-generated content, which individuals can then share with who they believe, are the appropriate peers within their social circle. Ultimately, social media allows individuals to self select into brand communities they feel are most relevant.
Whether or not Arnett’s emerging adult movement takes root, marketers are likely to face continued challenges in finitely targeting those in the 18 to 30 age group. However, marketers are now armed with a mix of media to meet the challenge and deliver relevant brand experiences to their intended audience.
Related articles:
- We’re Not Immature, We’re “Emerging Adults” [Kids Today] (jezebel.com)
- Divergent Perspectives on Emerging Adulthood (psypress.com)
