Q. What happened if suddenly all Marketing people became unemployed?
A. They would become Taxonomists
I made-up this PJ*, when I found out that I belong to a category of consumers called the Generation Y or Gen Yers. In short if you are born between 1979 and 1994 (exact dates are debatable), you are a Gen Yer. In America, Gen Yers are more than three times the size of Generation X or “Baby Boomers”. It is found that Gen Yers tend to be more conservative (old-fashioned?), multiculture tolerant and less rebellious that Gen Xers. It is said that they prefer humour, irony, and the (apparently) unvarnished truth. This explains why the Sprite tagline ‘Image is nothing. Obey your thirst’ has become such a hit.
It is true that we (I mean Gen Yers) have a different outlook on life and our career. We have been driven to achieve success in everything we do. Many of us might not desire overnight success but success nevertheless. This makes us extremely competitive and cautious. As a result, we demand such high starting paychecks and perks that Gen Xers find it so ridiculous to accept. I’m sure many of us know that our bosses find this hard to accept. How can a rookie Gen Yer be better than that experienced Gen Xer?
Of course, the Gen Xers would quitely accept that they have to work twice as hard these days because they try to catch up with the feverent pace of the Gen Yers. They will of course always attribute this to the faster pace of life, without even bothering to explain why is life too fast anyways. It is, they would irritatingly say, because of technology, of course. But duh isn’t technology supposed to make your life easier? Um… well.. no… this would be followed by some baseless anecdotes to prove you wrong.
The fact remains that mankind continues to evolve stride after stride with technology. We squeeze in more to our lives. An invisible force prompts the economy to shift gears. This force is the fresh blood or the emerging generation. They might be Gen Yers or even Gen Zers (post September 11?). But surely they have evolved. They work better in the current environment because they grew up in it.
I know this sounds like alarm bells for the Gen Xer reading this post. Didn’t mean to, but weren’t you extinct?!
- *PJ - A slang popular among the Hinglish speaking community that stands for ‘Poor Joke’. Often used when the joke sounds very contrived esp for the purpose of making a joke.
