For People Like Me: The Myth of Generations
Andy Crouch
April 1, 1999
To understand the power of "generation" talk in America, you've got to think like a marketing executive. One of the cornerstones of modern marketing—closely related to the all-important concept of brand—is the theory of segmentation. Once upon a time, soap manufacturers made soap, a product that pretty much everyone needs. Then along came Proctor & Gamble, who realized that they could make several different kinds of soap and market them to different audiences. In the process, they could sell not just soap (for which consumers would pay a certain price based on supply and demand) but also an additional intangible sense of quality—not necessarily the quality of being a better bar of soap, but the quality of being better for a particular kind of person (say, a housewife or a busy businessman). Consumers, P&G discovered along with every other modern corporation, would pay for that intangible quality of fitness "for people like me"—and since that quality was intangible and thus very cheap to produce, it was highly profitable. The goal of the modern marketer is to identify, or, if necessary, create these all-important, brand-defining differences, and sharpen their distinction in the mind of the consumer until he is unwilling to cross that sacred line between Ivory and Camay—much less leave the P&G fold altogether and buy Lever 2000—because that other product just isn't "for him." For maximum effect, one must create a self-consciousness in the consumer that encourages him to segment his own world—because once you have a customer with a pre-fabricated sense of where he fits in the consumer universe, the cost of pitching a new product goes down dramatically. The complex and expensive ...
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