Millennials are "Generation Next": Well Educated, Confident and Tattooed

I love how we neatly categorize people into the years they were born: "Boomers," "Gen-X," and now, "Millennials." You can debate whether these labels are overly simplistic, but here are the date ranges that social scientists use:

• Boomers: 1946-1964


• Gen-X: 1965-1980


• Millennials: 1980 - ??

For marketers and other communicators, what's important about these arbitrary age groups is that they remind us that we don't all think alike, especially if we are significantly different in age than other people we are trying to reach out and influence.

Given that most of my readers are either Gen-Xers or Boomers, the group to learn more about are the Millenials, those who are 30 years old and younger.

Luckily, the Pew Research Center has just put out a comprenhensive report on Millennials. You should have it bookmarked and you should refer to it as needed.

Here's the opening of their Executive Summary for a flavor of their report:

Millennials -- the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium -- have begun to forge their [generational personality]: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.

They are more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults. They're less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the most educated generation in American history.

Their entry into careers and first jobs has been badly set back by the Great Recession, but they are more upbeat than their elders about their own economic futures as well as about the overall state of the nation.

They embrace multiple modes of self-expression. Three-quarters have created a profile on a social networking site. One-in-five have posted a video of themselves online. Nearly four-in-ten have a tattoo (and for most who do, one is not enough: about half of those with tattoos have two to five and 18% have six or more). Nearly one-in-four have a piercing in some place other than an earlobe -- about six times the share of older adults who've done this.

But their look-at-me tendencies are not without limits. Most Millennials have placed privacy boundaries on their social media profiles. And 70% say their tattoos are hidden beneath clothing.