I’m still alive and the world hasn’t ended, so it must be time for our semi-irregular tilt at the horsh$% windmills of generational marketing.

The equine dung pile of evidence against is deep, here’s another gem.

BBH Labs created a “Group Cohesion Score” to measure how alike different groups actually are, using UK survey data on everything from “I use a refillable water bottle” to “there’s little I can do to change my life.”

The baseline? UK citizens agree with each other 48.7% of the time.  That feels right.

Those who read The Financial Times readers show more cohesion than The Sun readers.  That intuitively holds, the former is a niche, specialized pub, the latter a mass market rag.

And generational cohorts? They scored barely better than random groups. Hell, daily nut eaters had more in common with each other than Millennials do with other Millennials.

Let that sink in. People who eat nuts every day are a better marketing segment than an entire generation.  That too, makes sense as absurd as it reads.

Why This Is Absurd

In the UK, there are 78,000 Millennials whose children are also Millennials. Parent and child, same “cohort,” supposedly thinking and acting alike. But if that kid were born a year later? Boom, Gen Z. Totally different creature. Makes perfect sense, right?

The reality: Parent and child might share important characteristics, both nature lovers open to supporting environmental causes, both high in agreeableness and responding to certain messaging. But you’ll never find those meaningful connections through the horoscope of generational marketing.

The Real Problem

If your segment has more variation within it than between segments, it shouldn’t see the light of day. Yet countless organizations waste money on segmentations built on random attributes—birth year, grab-bag attitude statements, whatever data happens to be lying around.

Why? BBH Labs nails it:

“Why do we fall prey to these sweeping, often useless groupings? Part of it is laziness. Carrying around a caricature is easy, negotiating the complexities of real, breathing human beings is harder. We reduce people to tropes (millennials = experiences, avocados, purpose) to avoid the real work of understanding them.”

Want proof? Watch this actual Diet Coke ad—not a parody—built on the insight that Millennials value experiences, are independent, wear athleisure, would stay in a yurt, and run marathons. It’s every lazy stereotype in 30 seconds.

What Actually Matters

People are different, just not in the ways we typically segment them. What truly unites and differentiates people:

• Identity
• Personality
• Motivational Quality
• Quality of Experience

All of these are measurable and usable in mass market fundraising for a step change improvement. We do it everyday on behalf of our clients.

Like Don Quixote, we’re probably just getting knocked off our horse here. Confirmation bias makes people dig in deeper when confronted with evidence that contradicts their worldview, no matter how wrong.

So screw it. Have a Diet Coke. Just don’t blame it on your generation.

Kevin