Change is inevitable. Generation gaps are the same. It needs proactive intention and action to manage. Change is often a result of progression – in ideologies, outlooks and technologies.
With time, what people uphold as aspirational, enviable, wise and useful get altered. It takes a lot of work to stay updated and relevant. With the latest softer, ‘safe space’ approach to raising kids, one would expect greater connection and bonding resulting in zero generation gap. But, this isn’t the case. The struggle to keep up with the younger generation is more real than ever before. I say ‘more real’, because there was no struggle before. Parents never cared to understand their kids as much as they do today – the times are such. Businesses too struggle to understand their younger consumers and employees in order to stay preferred more than ever before. This has become a bigger struggle for brands in this suddenly changed world where consumers have more choice and individual consultancy than ever before.
A meeting with an old friend (both in terms of his age as well as the length of our association) of mine revealed to me that his 21 year old daughter tends to first read about a company’s founders and senior management online before considering applying for a job there. Unlike her father she is not concerned solely with making her resume look good with demonstrated experience at rich and famous companies. Whether you see her approach as wise or reckless will most likely give away the generation you belong to. The dad insists that she is utterly unprepared for the ‘real’ world. The 21 year old on the other hand, believes that the real world doesn’t need to be fit into, it can be made to fit you. Brands that don’t include actual empathy, intent and nurture into their management styles actively send out ‘not for me’ signals to a new generation of work force.
In an unrelated incident, I caught up with another old friend – I am at an age, when you tend to have a lot of them – who is the founder and CEO of a school that is just over a decade old. She mentioned that her school is driven by the vision of creating changemakers. Not just for the collective future but in their individual immediate reality. I found the latter part very interesting. She explained that her school does recognise that it is a hyper competitive, cut-throat, unkind world especially in matters involving money, jobs and careers. It’s just that there no longer is the need to learn to feed it further for a chance to survive in it.
It is still true that ‘the fittest survive’ but it is necessary to recognise that what that fitness is in has evolved. Long ago, it simply cued fitness in physical strength. It then became a fitness in rattiness – to stay ahead of the proverbial rat race. Today, it seems to be a lot about building the fitness to be able to refuse to be a rat.
My friend shared about the different kinds of parents she meets today at the school she runs. Most parents continue to be skeptical of this fresh approach to connect with and enable the children of today. But, there is an unmistakably growing set of parents who are well-informed on the advancements in understanding children in their current context.
I realised that the same classification could be applied to brand custodians too. Replace the word ‘parents’ with ‘brand custodians’ and the word ‘children’ with customers in the above paragraph and see for yourself.
Generation gaps are turning into generation gulfs. How well we succeed in viewing the world and life in it – through the eyes of the younger generation – will determine our success at future-proofing ourselves as brands and companies.
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