The age of individuality: Moving beyond generational labels

Charlie Hughes, strategy director at Vault49 London, offers her thoughts on the danger of grouping consumers by age and forgetting their individuality.

I have a request. Can we agree to stop lumping together vast swathes of people into Gen Z/Millennial/Boomer boxes and drawing sweeping conclusions? The world is far too colourful to be painted in broad strokes, yet we insist on perpetuating toxic stereotypes in every other headline and brief. Profiling through age alone is not just reductive, it’s lazy and it’s getting downright old.

Millennials are disillusioned Potterheads, decked in pink, with their sunglasses pushed cringingly far back on their face. Gen Z are lazy, quivering TikTok junkies that wile away their days asking “how to interact with my postman” and other similarly baffling conundrums on Reddit. Boomers are tight-fisted, right-leaning, bargain hunting workaholics with their text enlarged to its max on their iPhone 10 (exclusively housed in a battered wallet case complete with card holders). I forget what Gen X are up to... It’s a tired narrative that only further feeds the pervasive us vs them mentality.

While it’s presumably quite handy for marketeers to bundle us up in neat 15-year increments, doing so steamrollers over the nuanced richness of demographics. We lose vital cultural markers, such as class, ethnicity, education, where we grew up and where we live, to name just a few. But more than that, we gloss over the importance of the human experience, the subjective lens through which we perceive and interpret the world around us, and its role in shaping who we are.

Age is a dimension of identity, but not a solitary or defining one — just ask 95-year-old influencer Baddie Winkle.

There are undoubtedly cultural touchstones that connect us with our peers — the music that shaped us, the food that tastes like home, the shows that glued us to our screens (Celebrity Big Brother 3 I’m looking at you). But these shared experiences are not age gated; culture is cyclical. Vinyl records, Y2K fashion, and even Sophie Ellis-Bextor are as relevant in culture today as they were the first time round. They’re proof that what’s old is new again, and what’s new will eventually be old.

Instead of crafting a strategy to appeal to a homogenised Gen Z blob, get specific. Dive under the skin of cultures, lifestyles, mindsets and values you truly want to target. Design not for our differences, but the commonalities that defy space and time. Connect individual aspirations with universal storytelling.

Want to stay relevant? Stop guessing what people want based on their birth year. Engage with them, ask them, involve them. You’d be surprised what you learn when you take the time to listen.

Consumers aren’t looking to be marketed to; they want to be understood and celebrated in all their beautiful complexity.