I am glad to be a part of generation Y. And more than that I love building products for this huge population of around 71 million. ‘Echo-Boomers’ as they call it sometimes. There are three times more of us than previous Xers. And we are growing up, yeah it took us a while. Longer than previous generations, thats why they call us ‘Peter Pan Generation’ sometimes. But we don’t mind.
Contradiction is one of our strongest characteristics. Yes we are more conformist and yet we are liberal and immune to majority of bullshit, which would drive insane previous generations. We do not understand true meaning of rebellion. Our fashion, our music is not designed to tear down dogmas set by our predecessors. Some would call it ignorance, blindness, stupidity. But I see it as enlightenment. We saw it all: Cable TV explosion, sat radio, the Internet, e-zines, advertising, advertising, advertising, true anonymity on the web, loss of anonymity on the web. Market crashes, family divorces, more crashes. After growing up in constantly collapsing economies, with austerity measures we learned to see things differently.
I see generation Y as a clean slate for humanity, we do not have same urges and same needs as our predecessors, because we do not see ourselves at loss. We know that you can not pay for your tuition from summer jobs anymore, like our parents did. Or that housing 30 years ago was 100 times cheaper. And we are alright with that! This is our world, we adapted to it. We create our own fundamentals now.
This is exactly why I love building products for my generation.
We are practical yet we value quality. We are curious and we learn each day something new. We crave new things, but no ‘Mad Man’ marketing please. That shit will not fly, we can see right through it. In our world brands come and go, the ones which stay for too long are probably doing something fishy. And we will keep close watch on them. We get it, our power is not in protesting, burning factories, our power is in our attention to the brand.
We traveled the world on cheap last minute flights and 'Couchsurfing’, now we have money to spend so 'AirBnB' makes more sense to us. We are used to sharing, we are not greedy. We love our bicycles more than our parents loved their cars when they were our age. We see the world without borders, because of the Internet. We can reach any idea, any perception and world view just by reaching out to millions of our pears around the globe with a flick of a thumb.
My point is generation Y is really different. I am not biased here, if you really look closer this gen will amaze you. And yet so few are actually getting it. Old world does not get millennials. Sounds childish, but we have been ‘Peter Pans’ for so long that it seems that everyone forgot about our existence and importance.
Old brands are struggling with us. For example leading car manufacturers are desperate to sell to us. But we do not see any value in what they are offering. I better spend my money on good time at Burning Man and go to Asia or Europe than buy a car, I do not even have a driving licence.
Travel agencies are still catering to our dads and moms and grans. We love to travel, we love exploring, we do not need to wait for our retirement to do that. So we learned to do our own research, become our own tour guides. Rely on word of mouth of our peers. Again the Internet was a huge helper.
You see where I am going with this?
I love building products for generation which is sensible, tech savvy, cares about quality and sees value in personal touch. Products like Hype, are new generation of technology, new generation of business. It might not be obvious to you at first, but look around. Look how gen Y, the biggest market driver in the history, is consuming content, how it filters through swarms of information, hidden advertising, how it differentiates between value and rubbish.
In years to come I would bet on Vice News rather than CNN, ‘AirBnB’ rather than Hilton Hotels. We will see a lot of empires being swept off the markets they felt they own. And this will happen just by loosing our attention and interest. And who captures gen Ys attention will rise. Hype has a special place amongst the products I have built so far. It is far more mature, and it has that attractiveness which we all crave. It has charisma, character, human voice, it speaks the language I would love to hear from others more. It is not dry, it’s unpredictable, it tries to be a part of our life instead of just mimicking old ways. Those days are gone, technology is not important just because it’s technology anymore.
The goal here is not to dominate the world, get as many eyeballs as you can, make people addicted and hate your product.
It’s more about growing together with the crowd, becoming a channel, interpreter if you like. To help brands understand who are they dealing with, and help ourselves - generation Y to filter out the noise, the noise Old world created trying to appeal to us.
Aleksandr Pasevin