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Generational Astrology Redux
Cancer - and my name is Larry
… sad to say, these are real words. Real lyrics. Well, real enough to have hit Top of The Pops in the UK! It goes on … verse by painful verse.
Aquarius and my name is Ralph
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Libra and my name is Charles
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Leo and my name is Paul
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Cancer and my name is Larry
For the longest time I have argued that despite the continued insistence of many that ‘Millennials are different’ - as are ‘GenX, Boomers, GenY et al … they are not. In fact my usual reply is ‘poppycock’ and even wrote ‘Generational Categorization Akin To Astrology’ a few years ago to express the frustration. Needless to say, it changed nothing, and I still read about people who are positioned as ‘millennial experts’, and companies continue to target people by their ‘age category’. It is flawed thinking. So when Stowe Boyd’s newsletter arrived over the weekend [note] well, a couple of weeks ago now - I am a little behind[/note], it caught my eye, because he referenced researchers (at PWC no less) reporting that;
the real surprise: Non-millennial employees wanted exactly the same thing.
Seriously - the only surprise to me is that PWC makes a living out of this. The assumption of differences because of age is flawed band-wagon ‘thinking’. And yes thinking is specifically in ‘quotes’. People are people. I know 20-year-olds that behave like 60-year-olds and 80-year-olds that think like 30-year-olds. And that is just the start. Put People First … truly try to understand people. As I wrote in the excerpt for this post …. please stop talking about, categorizing and yes - judging people based on their age - and I do mean judging. It is absolute nonsense and yet we continue to talk and think and communicate in this shorthand because it suits lazy people in corporate marketing departments as they attempt to build personas that purportedly understand us so they can better target their ‘content’. And yes it is - just content.
Homogenized, bland, insipid content that drives people along their customer journeys and through their engagement funnels. Question … If we object to the factory farming of animals as part of our food chain … 
… why on earth do we put up with it when exactly the same thinking is applied to ourselves? Stop with it already.