Peer 2 Peer pressure

I must be getting older, as I now firmly regard myself as a different generation from the teens and twenty-somethings.

So, as I try to make sense of what a connected world fully means to companies and brands... I do try to understand the impact an always-informed and life-streaming culture has on people, but especially those who embrace technology & communications the most, the Millennials.

I guess, as well as building services for monitoring brand sentiment via Twitter we need to build algorithms that detect cyber-bullying via Facebook' and other such useful tools that were previously not needed or even thought of.

It then begs the question about the types of challenges and pressures that a 24/7 connection creates.

The future may be bright, but it also brings with it new issues we have yet to understand, let alone solve!

The influential millennials

There's no getting away from them, the Millennial are a defined generation, typically born in the Thatcher & Reagan years and beyond (or the 'Eighties & Ninties' if you prefer). They're also referred to as 'Generation Y' (the one that came after Generation X, obviously) and the biggest generation in numbers ever.

So just how influential are they?

Well, in Europe they make up about eleven percent of the workforce despite having higher costs for higher education than previous generations.

Having never known a world without the Internet, they obviously spend a great amount of time online and 18-24 year-olds make up 19% of the adult online population. But despite their apparent stereotype, they do not demonstrate the impatient, self-absorbed and disloyal characteristics sometimes labelled to them, but instead they are more optimistic, more loyal and less rebellious than previous generations .

Even though these tech-savvy young adults may still live at home with their parents, they do strongly influence many adult consumer buying choices (e.g. parent shopping habits) particularly the family technology preferences and habits. In a recent Motorola study Millennial were shown exerting: considerable influence on parental decisions about cable, DSL and satellite service, as well as on which HDTV to purchase, and even which programming packages to buy.

A slightly older piece of research from 2006 showed they influence household purchases in the fol owing ways:

• 81% of clothing and apparel purchases
• 77% of groceries purchases
• 76% of movie, video, DVD purchases
• 69% of video games and systems purchases
• 68% of computer purchases
• 66% of cellphone and computer software purchases…

And lets not forget that they are now politically active. For example in January 2007 Farouk Olu Aregbe, a student government coordinator at the University of Missouri, launched a Facebook group, "One Million Strong for Barack."

As mentioned by Brad Sago, in his report on The Online Shopping Psychology and Expectations of Millennials:

Over the next few decades, Millennials will continue to stamp their own unique imprint on business and society.