Rocking the Ages: The Yankelovich Report on Generational Marketing

By J. Walker Smith and Ann S. Clurman

Book Overview

You've done the research. You know your customer's income, where he lives, what he drives. But you don't know whether he prefers Bob Dylan or Alanis Morisette. Or Pepsi, or Snapple or tap water. And you don't know why. Why, for that matter, are Baby Boomers acting nothing like their parents did in their fifth decade? Why does the 40-year-old of today have much more in common with her 20y-year-old self than with today's college student? The hidden force at work in each of these examples and many others is generational. Generational ties link widely disparate individuals of varying education, income and life stage. And let's face it, reliable data about today's three living generations can be a vital element in a marketer's arsenal -- in some instances more important than any sort of demographic information. To an astonishing degree, your generational cohort -- Mature (born 1909-1949), Boomer (born 1946-1964), or Xer (born 1965-present) -- defines who you are, what you believe and what you buy. You don't need us to tell you this; you know it instinctively. For nearly 30 years, researchers at Yankelovich Partners, the world-famous research firm, have been compiling comprehensive information about consumers -- their preferences, habits and lifestyles -- mostly for the exclusive proprietary use of Yankelovich's corporate clients. In order to prepare this remarkable book, two leading Yankelovich analysts have mined that incredibly deep data to generate an unprecedented wealth of marketing information about the three active consumer generations: Generation X, the Boomers and the Matures. Rocking the Ages provides marketers with the strategies they need to understand and target these incredibly cohesive groups, including specific data on where they live, what they earn, what they buy and what motivates them to buy. Brimming with graphs and charts -- and real-life, real-product examples of families, individuals and their buying patterns -- Rocking the Ages is the definitive guide to targeting your business's products and services to your ideal consumers. Founded by Dan Yankelovich in 1958, Yankelovich Partners, the nation's leading consumer research organization, has published each year since 1971 a proprietary report on consumer behavior, The Yankelovich MONITOR, and has also provided highly specialized custom research for corporate clients, as well as public opinion research for Time (for 22 years) and Time /CNN (since 1989).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0887309003
• ISBN13: 9780887309007
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Fun for non-marketers

I find myself recommending this book to friends with no interest in marketing. Good, fun info that puts into perspective why you and your parents see things so differently. Highly recommended.

Great way to approach sales

Rocking the Ages is a beautifully writen book. It takes historical events and explaines how they formed the personality of each generation. This book helped me to curve our marketing and advertising techniques to reach our customers with a positive response. It clarifies how the generations view their lives and what they buy, how and why. It has helped me to understand my customers in a more personal manner. It is easy to get trapped into the needs of one own gereration, but this book clarifies the needs and desires of all generations, and how to approach them on a marketing level.

Wonderful sociology and history of the consumer economy

An incredibly quick, fun read. Plenty of insight into consumer habits and attitudes based on extensive research. The three categories (matures, baby boomers, and X-gen) may seem overly broad, but this is the first treatment of generalizations about the generations that resonates with me personally. (As a 27-year-old, it gets a little tiring to be told you're X-gen and to constantly think that the categorization doesn't reflect anyone in my age group I've ever met, never mind me personally. This book explains why the assumptions are generally incorrect, and their X-gen data and interpretations of the data correlates - to a startlingly large degree - with my own experiences and attitudes. This lends great credibility to their insights on matures and boomers beyond the data they've gathered.)Great reading for anyone in marketing, but also useful as a slightly twisted historical analysis of the last 70 years of U.S. history (if history can be reduced to events that influence consumer behavior).It gets a bit repetitive towards the end, but there is a new spin on the data in each chapter. The only real downside is that it's completely U.S.-specific. I got so much out of this book that I wish there was a version for other markets in our global economy.

You must read this book if you are in business!

Smith and Clurman review and synthesize thirty years of generational data gathered by the Yankelovich organization, identifying key similarities and differences among matures, boomers and gen xers. If you don't know what these terms mean, get the book now!Not just for marketing types! A must-read for business leaders, managers, recruiters, marketing professionals, HR professionals, parents or anyone (especially matures and boomers) who has to reach across generational boundaries to be more effective in their job or personal life. An easy and enjoyable read with many "Aha!'s."

Really hits home the generational aspects of marketing

It's not often a significant marketing book is published. I've often recommended that marketers read selectively in business history and management, because books that claim to help marketers (such as Faith Popcorn's) seldom deliver the goods. This new book is easy to follow and the distinction between boomers, matures, x-ers is argued quite well. It matters little whether Ted Bundy is an x-er icon or Mel Torme is a matures icon. These points are fun to dispute. But the point aptly driven home is that some of the most significant differences in consumer marketing today are generational.