Are you Generation X or Y? Are you a boomer or millennial? Are your kids Gen Z or Alpha? For decades marketers have used these age-based generational markers freely to define consumers, painting large swathes of people with the same brush stroke. But that’s changing now.

Ghazal Alagh, who is the co-founder and chief innovation officer, Honasa Consumer, the parent company of digitally-native brands such as Mamaearth and The Derma Co, has a different view. Even though the founders have repeatedly used the word millennial, Alagh tells us that brands like Mamaearth “don’t define consumers by generations, but rather by interests.” She explains that, in the ever-evolving world, “I don’t think we can put timelines to generations and segment them. We believe in getting consumers to buy into “why we exist” rather than “what we sell”.”

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Homegrown video-sharing social media service, Roposo’s vice president and general manager, Mansi Jain, calls her target consumer group “Gen Now”. Instead of defining and segmenting its audiences by age, Jain looks at attitudinal attributes like how spontaneous and impulsive people are. How they want to experience every moment to its fullest, because, you know, #YOLO (you only live once).

This approach informs Jain’s strategies to reach out to audiences everywhere from Bombay to Bir. Explaining the fundamental shift in how they consume, she says Gen Now is increasingly “shifting away from an intent-based model of shopping and even consuming content. They are also looking for experiences that closely replicate their offline experiences in an online environment.”

United by aspirations

Traditional generational markers based on age and segmentation based on geographies is slowly becoming outdated in the current tech-driven age.

For example, a Gen Z customer in a deep rural or semi-urban market will likely subscribe to the same broad philosophy as his or her urban counterpart, says Aniruddha Haldar, senior vice president (marketing) — commuters, corporate brand and dealer transformation, TVS Motor Company. Social media behaviour, lingo, role models and influencers transcend geographic cuts and unite these generational cohorts, he tells us.

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In 2020, the two-wheeler major tied up with Disney India's consumer products business to launch TVS NTORQ 125, a Marvel's Avengers inspired SuperSquad edition of scooters. The bikes sold well in urban, metro and non-metro markets.

Even PepsiCo thinks the same. A spokesperson of the food and beverages major said that they believe their customers are not bound by their demographics and psychographics.

“The brands across our beverages and foods portfolio individually identify with important clues and trends among various audience groups. This trend mapping and deep listening allows us to connect with consumers across gender and generations and helps build a narrative that is based on similar values, beliefs, and expectations,” the spokesperson said.

New India

Modi Naturals is diverting most of its media spends towards digital channels as part of its new media approach. This has been done with the target of enabling the brand to focus on markets beyond the Tier I category.

Akshay Modi, Managing Director, Modi Naturals Ltd says while the portfolio is in the premium edible oil and food segment, a significant part of sales volumes comes in from non-metros and tier-2 cities and towns.

A January 2022 report by ShareChat and Group M called the Bharat — The Neo India Report points out how Bharat users are as affluent and digitally savvy as India users. Key findings of the reports say 56 percent of Bharat use UPI and 49 percent use mobile wallets multiple times a week, 27 percent of Bharat use paid video streaming services against 29 percent India, 1 in 5 Bharat users invests in cryptocurrency and 39 percent of Bharat uses social media as their primary news consumption platform and prefers it over both print and TV combined. Consumers are united by aspirations.

They are also ultra-aware consumers who are unlikely to accept the same old “sugar-coated” propositions and communication from brands. This shift is evident in the rise of creators as brand advocates who influence purchase decisions. Today a social media star has more sway over which face cream you buy than a movie star.

K. Venkataramani, managing director and CEO, Health and Glow, says that powerful influencers, especially those who speak their mind, make a big difference while talking to these ultra-aware generations, “because they respond to voices they can truly believe.”

A lot of brands share the vision and thus engaging voices across demographics to be a part of their communication story is of vital importance to them.

Like Pepsico India has a pan-India strategy and all their digital initiatives are done keeping in mind both the urban and rural audience. Their recent campaign on Instagram Reels — #TheThinPossibleChip — engaged with over 3000 micro-influencers from cities across the country, right from Durgapur and Varanasi to New Delhi and Mumbai.

Read between the generational and geographical lines

Brand and cultural experts think that today’s marketers still have a long way to go to understand the major shifts that are rewiring behaviour, culture and how people consume everything from coke to content. This fault in comprehension is especially pronounced when it comes to understanding, in any meaningful fashion, the country’s youth.

“Age-cohorts classification alone is never enough. It helps with broad generalization, provides a backdrop, helps with a global perspective — as a lot of global research is available and citizens and media are becoming increasingly global. But each country may need to define/adjust its age cohort based on its own socio-political history/timeline,” says Mythili Chandrasekar, consumer behaviour and brand strategy specialist.

Anthropologist and cultural strategist Gayatri Sapru says, from a societal lens too, there is a lack of understanding of how quickly technology has disrupted the notion of generations.

“The fact is even previous generations have been largely painted with a broad stroke. But the dissonance is much more palpable with current generations because the way we look at generational markers, history, events, attitudes, are now totally dislocated from chronological age. Internet usage changes how people are understanding and assimilating in the world around them,” she explains.

These observations draw the ire of marketers because they forget they are a particular subset of people, who are more likely attracted to change and who were more likely the ones who “rebelled” (at their time) by joining this line of work. “They are unaware of this bias at a core level. And therefore there is a lot of projection that happens, because the echo chamber reconstructs their memory of youth rather than truly looking at what is happening and accepting different ways in which people are behaving,” says Sapru candidly.

According to Chandrasekar, ultimately marketers want growth and behavioural change, and that can only come with appreciating and addressing the nuances, reading between the generational and geographical lines.

“Marketing is about getting the bird's eye view and then being able to swoop down to catch the worm,” concludes Chandrasekar.

—With inputs from Saumya Tewari

(Edited by : Ajay Vaishnav)