Marketing to Millennials

Abstract

Marketers are interested in Millennials because they are a huge market, and understanding how they think is important to marketers and advertisers. There are an estimated seventy to eighty million Millennials and their purchasing power is very large. How they shop is of considerable interest to marketers, who wish to find and engage with them. The chapter offers various strategies for engaging with them. One marketer offers a typology with twelve different kinds of Millennials, which means marketing to them is a complicated matter.Grid-group theory is used to suggest another typology, with four “lifestyles” for Millennials: egalitarians , elitists , individualists , and fatalists . Social anthropologist Mary Douglas is quoted suggesting that unconscious imperatives in each of the four lifestyles shapes the consumption practices of Millennials. The chapter ends with a discussion of the impact Millennials have had on traditional advertising practices.