We’re thinking of millennials all wrong

Do yourself a favor and stop calling me a millennial. It’s not insulting. It’s just irrelevant.

“Millennial” is a dirty word to some, and to others it has lost all meaning because of its overuse — in the office, in research reports, in conversation. The immediate associations are entitled, lazy, egotistical and selfie-obsessed. It’s safe to say millennials have a bad rap. But what’s the point of using one loaded word to describe an entire generation?

There isn’t. Companies ranging from retailers to life insurance companies are obsessed with millennials and kvetch about how they’re tough to market to. That’s why companies are jumping on the Snapchat ad bandwagon and betting big on social media influencers.

But by making blanket assumptions about an entire generation, you’re ignoring the different stages of life millennials experience from adolescence to real adulthood. Eighteen-year-olds are just graduating from high school and entering college. Many are concerned with sleeping through their 8 a.m. lectures and finding a summer internship.

Even older millennials working at the same company and living in New York City don’t share the same habits and patterns.

I have a 31-year-old colleague who just moved into a two-bedroom apartment with her husband and newborn baby. Meanwhile, my single, 30-year-old colleague went on vacation to Barcelona and Havana this year and doesn’t have any immediate plans to start a family.

Millennials are officially America’s largest generation, with 75.4 million inhabiting the US. But how can we stereotype 75.4 million people? We can’t. And Ivey Business School marketing professor Niraj Dawar agrees with me — generational identifiers are completely and utterly archaic, he says. And if it’s any consolation to you, he is not a millennial.

He argues that demographic segmentation is “meaningless,” “obsolete,” and “so 20th century,” in a piece for Harvard Business Review.

Here’s his basic argument: It is erroneous to claim that each generation — baby boomer, Gen X, Gen Y (millennial), Gen Z — has its unique set of experiences that define it (and that marketers try to capitalize on). The advent of smartphones has made it unnecessary to make such sweeping generalizations about consumer behavior.

Dawar points out that the best predictor of brand preference or brand loyalty is past behavior. And with consumers buying more of their purchases online than in stores for the first time this year, retailers and marketers have access to our penchants and shopping patterns better than ever.

If anything, we should be focusing on segmenting even further, as companies like Facebook (FB), Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) and our own parent company Yahoo (YHOO) are by using our data to target ads as we’re browsing the internet.

If you’re still not convinced, the arbiters of demographics don’t recognize a “millennial generation.” The Census Bureau itself has stated that baby boomers are the only official generation.

“The Baby Boom is distinguished by a dramatic increase in birth rates following World War II and comprises one of the largest generations in US history. Unlike the baby boom generation, the birth years and characteristics for other generations are not as distinguishable and there are varying definitions used by the public,” the bureau’s chief demographer, Howard Hogan, told The Washington Post last year.

It’s worth noting that many millennials themselves don’t even consider themselves millennials. Only 40% of people between 18 and 34 years old identify as part of the “millennial generation.” Thirty-three percent consider themselves part of the next bracket — Gen X.

And if you’re thinking this is so typical of a millennial to write, maybe you’re right. But it’s hard to argue against the claim that lumping us together is a lazy — and ineffective — way to define a generation that spans 20 years.

Melody Hahm is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering entrepreneurship, technology and real estate.

Follow her on Twitter @melodyhahm.