Marketing Management with Millennials

Like many other fields that exist within business and society at large, there is always some modicum of shifting and changes that occur. They usually do not happen overnight but they can move quickly due to being aided and assisted along in prominence by the presence of technology and other advancement. Social media, for example, is just one thing that has helped change the pace of society from noticeable to nearly frenetic. Even so, generational changes are the biggest source of change in many instances and paradigms and marketing management is no different. While the desires, wants and needs of the older generations is still relevant to many marketers, the emergence of the Millennials over the last generation and the coming reveal of Generation Z has most certainly changed the marketing landscape and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

When some marketing professionals and people with opinions about the industry are asked about the patterns and changes being caused by the increased emergence of Millennials, many of the older and more "mature" generations are often dismissive or even incendiary about the younger sets. While there are elements of ignorance and ambivalence in every generation, it would be a mistake to just assume that the younger generations have nothing worthwhile to offer when it comes to marketing. Indeed, more than one study has revealed that the increasing chatter about corporate social responsibility and mindfulness is no accident. Sure, some of it devolves into navel-gazing and other forms of unwarranted self-importance. Others still are not the least bit reasonable or sufficiently perceptive about what they think and why (Millennial Marketing, 2017).

Even with that, there are a great many Millennials that understand that businesses and marketers have money to make. At the same time, those people also insist that the companies that they do business with act and behave in certain ways and actively refrain from allowing or encouraging other behaviors. For example, it has come to be that company behaviors like focusing on sustainability and recycling, just to name two things, are very important to Millennials. It is to the point that these younger adult Americans will choose who and who not to do business with based on the activities (or lack thereof) of the firms that they choose to buy from. An easy example would be the Millennials that buy smaller and more fuel-efficient cars (or even electric or other renewable energy cars) as opposed to cars that only use fossil fuels and/or use those fossil fuels in high amounts. Other Millennials will do more business with firms that "give back" to the community as opposed to firms that just maximize their profits and fail to do so, or at least fail to advertise that they do so. All of this is extremely useful and relevant to both current employee prospects and dreams as well as future ones down the road. Just advertising a product, by itself, will become more and more insufficient as a means to sell a product. Of course, there will always be people that go after the latest fads and glom onto whatever celebrities like Kim Kardashian hock and sell via their shows and media appearances. However, corporate social responsibility is consuming more and more of the marketing paradigm and it would seem that this phenomenon is here to say. There are some challenges and pitfalls involved in all of this but they can be navigated (Baldassarre, 2017).