If we hope to engage and influence Millennials, we need to understand how they think, what motivates them and what doesn't. In just a few minutes, this article from Spokane's alternative weekly, The Inlander, will provide you with valuable insights into their mindset. Highly recommended!
Here are a few excerpts:
[W]e millennials don't like to be defined by others. Kids these days don't like "kids these days" essays. We hit back against Time magazine with our weapons of choice: rants, memes and Photoshopped pics, slamming our elders for failing the environment and the economy.
All millennials, you see, despise generalizations. We don't see our generation through polling averages, with their standard deviations and margins of error. We see it as a collage of 87 million self-portraits, in some senses more individualistic than ever.
Hence selfies: No photographer, no fancy camera, no middleman. Just a smartphone, and maybe a mirror. We choose whether to flex, pout or raise one eyebrow, and we choose when to snap and where to upload. You call it narcissism; we call it control over our own image. We want the freedom to tell our individual story, then process it through our own Instagram filter.
Then we'll post it everywhere, and beg for you to like it, praise it, love it.
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You can't talk about millennials without considering that seismic context: It's tough to get a job when there aren't any. It's tough to buy a house when you're unemployed. It's tough to have kids when you're flat broke.
And we're hesitant about piling on more debt. Until recently, Leigh-Anne Kelly, 31, sold cars at a Spokane Subaru dealership: When she did see millennials, which wasn't often, they came cautiously and put up big down payments. She's the same way, preferring her old car to a new one from the dealership.
"I am proud of not having a car payment," Kelly says. "I got hell from my co-workers for not diving into debt immediately."
For millennials, the American Dream hasn't just become harder to achieve, it's become less appealing. In six years, homeownership rates for those under 35 plummeted, from 41 percent to 36 percent.
"I see the older generation, they want to get right back after it, and rebuild their wealth," says Kolby Schoenrock, 26, a local property appraiser and Windermere real estate agent. But he says that's not the case with younger buyers.
"They're looking for something smaller, more cozy, more functional, cheaper to maintain," he says. "What they're pinning on their Pinterest is cool and small, versus big and gaudy."
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Karlin Andersen, 19, was a sophomore in high school when she watched her family's business — a cabinetmaking shop — crumble in the recession. Nobody was building homes, so nobody wanted cabinets. She'd grown up sweeping sawdust and cleaning bathrooms at the shop, assuming that someday she and her brother would take over the family business. Now those plans have been blown away.
"If you just focus on what makes the most money — that obviously didn't work out that well," Andersen says. "So what do we shift our focus to? Something that will make us happy."
She has lofty dreams, like working for 60 Minutes or National Geographic. Improbable, she knows. But like many millennials, she's not afraid of improbability.
"Behind all of that is this sense of true helplessness of the debt that they're in," Reilly says. "People don't see a future where the American idea of retirement exists. So they're looking for a life that's fulfilling now."
Read the full article here:
http://www.inlander.com/spokane/the-selfie-generation/Content?oid=2385843
