Are you ready for the March of the Millennials?
By Glyn Knaresborough - Director, Enterprise Solutions, CSC UK
Unless you've been hiding in a cave somewhere in the arctic, you can’t have failed to notice the rising impact of technology on our everyday lives. In fact I just watched a documentary on life in a remote Mongolian village, in the arctic circle, where they could access the internet using satellite communication, so maybe it is impacting arctic cave dwellers as much as ourselves.
We can argue the pros and cons of this technological revolution, however there is no denying that it has given birth to a new Generation – The Millennials. Millennials, born between 1982 - 2003, are the largest generation since the Baby-Boomers, and its eldest members are just beginning to come of age in the workplace. Unlike many of us, Millennials can’t remember a world without the Internet; never mind Google, Facebook, Twitter and 24 hour access to their peers from anywhere in the world.
Millennials are already challenging the organisations they work for and changing the way in which they buy your products and services. It’s a challenge many businesses have already risen to – just look at Apple’s reinvention of ‘Cool’ and the desire of ‘i’ everything to the recent statement that “if Facebook were a country it would be the 3rd largest in the world”. Both companies result in having a younger than normal consumer demographic.
What about the organisations that haven’t yet reacted, is it too late? Is it worth reacting? Are we witnessing a corporate version of the teenage fad? All valid questions, to which I wish I had a crystal ball to see the impact 3 or 5 years from now. Sadly I don’t, but I do know what our customers are talking to us about, and many think it’s a very real challenge they want to address – and quickly.
They want to understand how they can start to transform their businesses to not only attract the top young talent into their organisation, but also sell their range of products and services in a digital world many of them are unaccustomed to. The upside here is that these more forward looking businesses are also seeing positive knock on effects in their other markets, a group I call the ‘Wannabe Millennial’ that breed of annoying people that always seem to have the latest gadget and disposable cash to live their lives inside this technological world by choice. Probably more annoying is that I seem to be one of ‘those people’!
The good news is that there are many things you can do to start addressing these challenges and help unravel the mysteries of our new technological teenagers. The first place I always advise any organisation to start is by looking from the Outside > In. It still never fails to amaze me how many businesses don’t really understand the new ways in which they can serve new and existing consumers using low cost digital channels that exist today. The key thing to remember here is that in this new world, consumers don’t tend to believe advertisers or product owners’ claims so running a digital marketing campaign or setting up a user forum isn’t going to cut it unfortunately – Millennials see right through that stuff very quickly.
The modern consumer (Millennial or wannabe) doesn’t discriminate between real and online friends. Someone with over 1,000 ‘friends’ on Facebook will have no hesitation in taking buying advice from people they have never physically met before, rather than a TV advertisement or a sales person in a retail outlet. What’s even more interesting is that it is the same inside the organisation too. For example I’ve been working with ‘friends’ inside my own business for over 4 years, and I’ve never met many of them. I use tools like those found in the external social world, in fact I couldn’t do my job without them. You can learn a great deal about how you might improve collaboration and engagement, by asking the very people in your organisation who live in this social world.
So if you’re looking at how to start your journey, take a big step back from the day-to-day and look at the Outside>In. You’ll be amazed at what you, your colleagues and your Millennials already know. The trick is how you put it into practice.
I think that should be my topic for next time, unless you have any better suggestions. If you do, then simply drop me an old fashioned email to gknaresborou@csc.com, tweet me on @glyn_kn or connect to me on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/glynknaresborough. You could write, but I honestly can’t remember the 5 lines of my office address and you can’t poke me on Facebook until we become real friends.