The genius of generational marketing and how it can drive your business growth

What can go happen if brands get it wrong with generational marketing? A lot, according to Katrina McCarter, founder of Partnership Mastery and Marketing to Mums, who shares a cautionary tale.

A few years ago, I was hired by an Australian artisan chai company to drive their local online sales business. They already had a thriving business supplying hundreds of cafes across the globe but needed to nail the direct-to-customer stuff.

The first thing I needed to understand was who their online customer was. This is the core of any successful marketing strategy. Specifically, I wanted to understand if their core online customer was a Gen X woman or a Gen Y (Millennials).

Knowing their café business extremely well, the owners were convinced she was a Millennial Mum in activewear, fresh from Pilates with toddler on hip, drinking chai in cafes. This was based on what the team saw when they did deliveries to their café clients. It was purely anecdotal. No supporting data.

But I felt the core online customer might be more like me: a Gen X woman and passionate chai drinker.

Understanding the customer

Chasing the wrong generation of customers can spell disaster for any brand. So it was essential I got this right. Making assumptions doesn’t make money or business sense, so I ran a research project to identify the brand’s most profitable online customer.

Any guesses as to who it was?

Yep. A Gen X woman. A non-aspirational coffee drinker who turned to chai in the afternoons to control her caffeine intake.

Had we created our marketing strategy around the Millennial Mum drinking chai in cafes we would have risked sales, customer loyalty, relevance—and their whole online business.

Instead, I drew on my insights into the Gen X consumer to build a strategy that appealed to these women. The imagery and language used were updated, a newsletter was introduced, plus collaborations with other brands that had a strong Gen X community. And we focused hard on relationship building by amplifying the brand story and showing clients ways to bake with chai as well as drink it.

Within eight months, online sales were up 655 per cent on the same time last year.

And this is why I love generational marketing. The impact getting it right can make for any business is extraordinary.

What is Generational Marketing?

For those new to it, generational marketing is a marketing strategy that involves tailoring your products, services and messaging to target specific generations based on their unique characteristics, behaviours and preferences. Each generation is influenced by the social, economic and cultural factors prevalent while they grew up. These experiences shape their values attitudes and buying habits.

Generational marketing is crucial because it allows a brand to resonate with its target audience on a deeper level. By understanding the unique values and experiences of different generations, brands can create targeted strategies that increase customer loyalty and engagement and keep the brand competitive in the rapidly evolving marketplace.

The role of marketing has expanded significantly in the past decade. Marketers and business owners are expected to be expert on SEO, social media, email marketing, Google ads and now AI. Because of the increasing complexity and ways to reach customers, I’m increasingly finding marketers and business owners are spread thin and it’s easy to make assumptions about who our customers are and how they like to communicate.

The results of these assumptions can be devastating.

Tapping into generations

Like the chai business almost did, by chasing the wrong generation of customers or not understanding the generation of customers you want to attract deeply enough, you can experience a significant decline in sales and lack of loyalty. You can miss opportunities and there exists a very real threat that we can go out of business.  This is largely caused by choosing the wrong channels, messaging and language.

On the flipside, if you get this right your brand can enjoy significant sales and revenue boosts through building meaningful long-term relationships. You can grow a legion of customers who want you to succeed and grow and will stimulate word of mouth marketing for you. They will assist you with future research and new product development.

The best way to be introduced to generational marketing is to know the six generations of consumers.

Seniors—born 1928-1945.

Baby Boomers—born 1946-1964.

Generation X—born 1965-1980.

Generation Y or Millenials—born 1981-1996.

Generation Z—born 1997-2010.

Generation Alpha—born 2011 and up.

What each generation loves, loathes and values is a story in itself, so here’s something I prepared a little earlier: a downloadable on the top seven insights of each generation: www.katrinamccarter.com/secretlanguage

 Trust me: this is the marketing strategy that will drive growth

This post first appeared on Flying Solo on October 26 2023, and was updated on Feb 6 2025.

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