Category Archives: Millennial Generation

Addressing the “praise deficit”: young workers putting a strain on organizations and organizations are responding inappropriately

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One of the things Black Dog specializes in is how generational dynamics affect organizational behavior and effectiveness. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, companies across the US are flying headlong toward a massive macro-succession pile-up, and the collective personality of the Millennial Generation (born from ~1980-2000) is going to play a major part in mid-management breakdowns in the next few years.

If you’d like a glimpse of the stress the Millennials are already exerting on organizations, you’ll want to read a new analysis from the Wall Street Journal‘s CareerJournal.com site. In it, Jeffrey Zaslow chronicles how businesses are addressing the Mills’ excessive need for praise: Continue reading →

Sprite Yard is the right idea

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And this morning, a glimpse of the future:

Sprite Launches Mobile Social Network
by Tameka Kee, Thursday, Jun 7, 2007 6:00 AM ET
MOVE OVER, MYSPACE AND FACEBOOK. Coca-Cola’s Sprite is debuting its own social network, called the Sprite Yard.The brand’s global interactive marketing team is betting that the mobile platform will set new benchmarks for consumer brand engagement.

Launched officially in China on June 1, with plans for a U.S. rollout to start June 22, users connect with the Sprite Yard through any WAP-enabled phone. After texting the word “YARD” to 59666 (LYMON), they are invited to register–and to create a tag name, a profile, and even an avatar. Members of the community can then share pictures, send “Shouts” to their friends, post “Scribbles” to a discussion board, and plan events on a shared calendar.

At the Sprite Yard, users will also have access to “Nuggets” of exclusive downloadable content, from mobisodes (short animated and video content created by Coca-Cola and other media partners) to ringtones. The branding tie-in is designed to drive sales as well as engagement, as content can only be unlocked by using a PIN found under Sprite bottle caps. (Story.)

I’m in no position to predict how well executed this project will be, but the concept is dead-on and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes the model for consumer brand mobility over the next couple of years. Continue reading →

The looming macro-succession crisis

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I was reading a Seattle Times story earlier today on how men in their 30s are earning less than their fathers did. An interesting story top to bottom, but the concluding section drew me back around to something that I really haven’t talked about enough lately – the looming generational macro-succession nightmare facing corporate America.

Diehard careerist baby boomers also might partly explain the inability of 30-something men to move up the income ladder as quickly as their fathers. From the moment Generation Xers entered the workplace, boomers have been the “ceiling” blocking their way up the income ladder, said Peter Rose, a partner with marketing-research company Yankelovich in Los Angeles.”The boomers stand out in defining themselves in terms of their work and have shown a disinclination to get out of the way,” he said.

It’s hard to blame the Boomers for not getting the heck out of the way, although I’ve certainly been one of those Xers stacked up beneath that in-no-hurry-to-leave Boomer leadership dynamic. But there’s a basic numbers crunch that’s about to hit, and it’s going to throw a lot of companies into leadership transition crisis. Consider: Continue reading →

Text is king, and it’s going to stay that way for awhile

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Recently I was sort of explaining the business to a friend whose knowledge and perceptions about the mobility market were probably pretty common. Like a lot of people I’ve talked to, she sort of looked suspiciously at my suggestion that any effective marketing, advocacy or content play was going to need to be based in SMS (text messaging).

But what about Blackberries and all the phones that stream higher-order content, she wondered. She was under the fairly common misperception that penetration of these technologies is a lot greater than it actually is. For example, what do you think the penetration of WAP-addressable handsets is? Continue reading →

McLuhan’s cell phone

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Mass communication guru Marshall McLuhan taught us that the medium is the message. As marketing pros, we understand that brand is the embodiment of the message. So in theory, brand and media are inextricably entwined concerns, right?

One of my partners attended ad:tech 2006 in Chicago last year. The organization, which also holds events in New York, San Francisco, London, Shanghai and Sydney, bills itself like this: Continue reading →