Forget Generations X and Y: Here comes Generation V

Computerworld - Much has been made of the stereotypical characteristics of the generations that followed the baby boomer era. The same can be said of the latest generation, but Gartner Inc. warns marketers to define them by their online actions rather than their birth dates. In a report released this week, Gartner said that traditional marketing methods won't work with this new group of consumers.

The latest group, dubbed Generation Virtual, or V, is made up of people from multiple age groups who make social connections online -- through virtual worlds, in video games, as bloggers, in social networks or through posting and reading user-generated content at e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com, said Adam Sarner, senior analyst at Gartner.

The V generation includes people who are drawn to the Internet's "flat meritocracy," in which people can gain status and acknowledgment through ways not generally available in the physical world, such as providing advice or recommendations or excelling at a video game, he said. Basically, Generation V comprises people who replace physical experience with online experience, Sarner added.

The online distinction is important, he noted, because companies looking to sell products and services to this generation of consumers can no longer rely on traditional demographic data like name, age and address to tailor marketing messages. Generation V is more likely to interact with marketers anonymously -- through online personas created by all their online behaviors, Sarner said.

"We have to start dealing with this idea of anonymous, multiple personas interacting with our businesses and how to do that," Sarner said. "[Businesses] are creating a world with processes to get them to purchase things. Virtual environments will be a way to orchestrate customer exploration, [but] underneath is the reality that they are providing goods and services."

Over time, gathering details about the online personas of consumers will become far more important than the mining of demographic data, he added. By 2015, Gartner asserts, more money will be spent marketing and selling to multiple online personas than money spent marketing to offline consumers.

For companies to prepare to market to Generation V, Gartner recommends the following:

• Organizing products and services around multiple online personas
• Selling to the persona, not the person
• Creating virtual environments as a way to orchestrate customer exploration toward purchases
• Shifting investments from known customers to unknown ones
• Developing and retaining new employee skills to attract, connect, contribute and gain insight from Generation V and its virtual environments

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