BUS602: Marketing Management

When they became parents, baby boomers delivered a group to rival their own. Born between 1976 and 2001, their sixty million children are sometimes called "echo boomers" (because their population boom is a reverberation of the baby boom). They're still evolving, but they've already been assigned some attributes: they're committed to integrity and honesty, family oriented and close to parents, ethnically diverse and accepting of differences, upbeat and optimistic about the future (although the troubled economy is lessening their optimism), education focused, independent, and goal oriented. They also seem to be coping fairly well: among today's teens, arrests, drug use, drunk driving, and school dropout rates are all down.

Generation Ys are being courted by carmakers. Global car manufacturers have launched a number of 2012 cars designed to cater to the members of Generation Y. Advertisers are also busy trying to find innovative ways to reach this group, but they're finding that it's not easy. Generation Ys grew up with computers and other modes of high technology, and they're used to doing several things at once - simultaneously watching TV, texting, and playing games on the computer. As a result, they're quite adept at tuning out ads. Try to reach them through TV ads and they'll channel-surf right past them or hit their TiVo remotes. You can't get to them over the Internet because they know all about pop-up blockers. In one desperate attempt to get their attention, an advertiser paid college students fifty cents to view thirty-second ads on their computers. Advertisers keep trying, because Generation Y is big enough to wreck a brand by giving it a cold shoulder.