Trade Talk: What can researchers glean from Pew’s rethinking of generational definitions?

Joe Rydholm can be reached at joe@quirks.com.

I’ve always been fascinated by the enduring strength of the labels and definitions we have placed on groups of people based on when they were born. From Baby Boomer to Gen Z, we’ve been happy to use and therefore codify the terms and the generally accepted ranges of birth dates that demarcate one cohort from another.

I mean, I totally get it. As human beings and as marketers or researchers, we appreciate the ease and efficiency of being able to share a shorthand that helps us communicate in broad strokes about huge numbers of people.

But while each group shares defining traits, viewpoints and habits, I’ve never felt totally comfortable tarring every member with the same brush and have hoped marketers and researchers aren’t too rigid in their applications of generational designations.

That point is one that qualitative researcher and frequent Quirk’s author and Quirk’s Event speaker Susan Fader has made when arguing for the value of what she calls cognitive demographics, which, as she has written “is about recognizing how people self-define versus putting them into demographic categories predefined by marketers or researchers.”

In other words, we can apply all the catchy names and labels we want but we can’t forget that we are talking about people here, in all their inconsistent and idiosyncratic glory.

Thus I read with interest an early-May article from Pew Research (“How Pew Research Center will report on generations moving forward”) on changes the august organization is making in how it thinks about and uses generational labels and definitions.

While Pew’s motivations are certainly unique to its situation, its reasoning is also germane to marketers and researchers. Just as Pew aims to use its data to tell the most accurate stories about the demographic movements and trends it sees, so too are those in the business realm employing age-based codifications to give shape, meaning and relevance to their advertising and marketing. But no matter who is using them, inaccurate base assumptions and characterizations are bad for everyone involved.

In typical fashion, Pew’s yearslong process was thorough and comprehensive. It spoke to a range of experts and also to critics of its generational analyses; it tested to see if it could compare findings from earlier telephone surveys to current online research-based data; and it experimented with higher-level statistical analyses to allow it to isolate the effect of generation.

I urge you to read the full article but along with general advice to not be too rigid with or beholden to age-based groupings, Pew’s Kim Parker suggests thinking of temporal labels as lenses rather than fences. “Existing generational definitions also may be too broad and arbitrary to capture differences that exist among narrower cohorts,” she writes. “A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years. As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience and behavior within generations. The key is to pick a lens that’s most appropriate for the research question that’s being studied. If we’re looking at political views and how they’ve shifted over time, for example, we might group people together according to the first presidential election in which they were eligible to vote.”

That lens idea is particularly apropos to marketers and researchers. For your product or service, what age-related lens or lenses feel most useful through which to view your consumer? It doesn’t have to be the broad span of the Baby Boomers. Perhaps better, as the Pew article notes, is to group people by the decade in which they were born, as this would create narrower cohorts of members who share more in common, or by their age during key historical events like the Great Recession or COVID-19 or technological innovations like the introduction of the iPhone.

Granted, the parameters of your lenses could end up being just as arbitrary as those defining Gen Z or Millennials but the act of finding them could lead to the kind of creative thinking that uncovers fruitful new areas of investigation.