Stereotypes Vs Segments

Only crap marketers
mistake stereotypes
for segments
The ASA’s research into harmful gender

stereotypes is spot-on, but why do
marketers believe lumping millennials
together as one makes any more sense?
By Mark Ritson 26 Jul 2017
There has always been a very uncomfortable that sunless room, but there is only one book that
proximity between segments and stereotypes. The still sticks in my memory a quarter-century later.
only difference is data. If I say that women like pink
and men like blue I am a sexist moron. But if I have
a survey of a representative sample of the British The impact of ad stereotypes
public that shows a statistically significant skew of
female consumers preferring the pink version of my Decoding Advertisements by Judith Williamson was
product and a male preference for the blue one of the first proper semiotic attempts to show
alternative, I am a marketer armed with insight. that ads not only promote brands, but also have
other far-reaching effects on society. The killer part
Tricky stuff, eh? of Williamson’s book is how she shows the manner
in which ads contribute to the prevailing ideology
That difference was very much top of mind last by reaching consumers through the ‘back door’ of
week thanks to two very different marketing stories, their consciousness.
one enormously encouraging and the other deadly
dumb. When a consumer sees a TV ad with a mother and
daughter using Fairy liquid to do the dishes, she
On the positive side was the work of the Advertising instantly puts up her perceptual defenses to avoid
Standards Authority (ASA) on gender stereotyping. falling for the commercial message that funds the
Its report on the subject confirmed that while advertising message. But, as Williamson notes, with
multiple factors contribute to gender her defenses fully engaged in rejecting the claim
misrepresentation and inequality, a significant that Fairy is a superior cleaner, she accepts entirely
amount of the problem can be traced back to the representation of women at the kitchen sink
portrayals of women in advertising. doing the washing up and the complete absence of
any men helping out.
It has been a long-running problem for advertisers.
When I was working on my PhD in marketing many Advertising’s overt commercial message belies its
moons ago I spent (literally) 14 months in the library more pernicious gender representations which,
at Lancaster University on my literature review. God thanks to multiple repeated viewings and
knows how many monographs and books I unquestioned portrayals of everyday life, serve to
ploughed my way through back in 1992 and 1993 in confirm and reinforce the order of things. It’s not
just that advertising is guilty of the You can see where this is all going. The airline is
misrepresentation of gender roles and body image going to be very ‘digital’ and staffed by young, hip
and all the other shit that continues to dog women and very casually dressed young people who
in the 21st century – it may well be the prime occasionally remember to bring you your beverage
suspect. while worrying about global warming and posting
pictures of their pets on Instagram.
I’m hardly the world’s biggest champion for
women’s issues or political correctness. I write
columns about my penis and use the word ‘f#$k’ far
too frequently. But what the ASA has uncovered is
fundamentally important, as are the subsequent
new standards for gender portrayals in advertising
that they will introduce to the UK. Any decent
marketer must support the initiative, surely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sogwN2qVmg&feature=emb_logo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sogwN2qVmg&feature=emb_logo
We took one big step forward

last week thanks to the ASA, and
just as big a step backwards
with Joon and its ridiculous My problem with this whole stupid idea is, of
course, that the whole myth of the millennial
age-based stereotypes. segment makes a mockery of just about every
principle of basic segmentation. Clearly millennials
as a generational cohort do exist – they are the two
billion people on the planet born between 1981 and
2000. But the idea that this giant army all want
similar stuff or think in similar ways is clearly
But in the same week that advertising, for once, was
horseshit. Similarly, the idea that they also differ
giving me the warm fuzzies it was also smashing
from other older cohorts in significant ways is
me repeatedly in the balls with the ‘millennial’
superficially persuasive but turns out to be equally
hammer once again. Over in Paris, Air France and
nonsensical.
KLM were busy announcing that they were
launching a new airline called Joon specifically
aimed at the millennial consumer. Look away, those
of you of an intemperate disposition; the paragraph Millennials are not a segment
below from Caroline Fontaine, vice-president of
global brand at Air France, explains the strategy. Time after time researchers have set out to show
the differences between millennials and other
“We started with our target customer segment, the consumers. And in every instance those
millennials, to create this new brand that means researchers return with data that says that, aside
something to them. Our brief was simple: to find a from the general effects of being younger, hornier
name to illustrate a positive state of mind. This and poorer than the old f#$kers ahead of them on
generation has inspired us a lot: epicurean and the demographic motorway of life, they are actually
connected, they are opportunistic in a positive remarkably similar to everyone else.
sense of the word as they know how to enjoy every
moment and are in search of quality experiences Martin Schiere is a very good Dutch researcher who
that they want to share with others. Joon is a brand recently completed a massive quantitative study of
that carries these values.” 15,000 millennials in more than 20 different
countries. His main finding, summarised in the bar chart below, is all you need to know about the millennial
market segment. Schiere compared a very sound attitudinal segmentation across the millennial,
generation X and post-war cohorts. As you can see below, the green millennials are spread relatively
consistently across the five different attitudinal groups. Some are conservatives, some are challengers.
Some are creatives while others are achievers.
Charts: Glocalities
Being a millennial, irrespective of what some ropey YouTube video with Simon Sinek might have led you to
believe, is not a ticket to a completely different kind of mindset. In fact, there is a significant chance that if
you lined up five millennials and asked them an attitudinal question they would each disagree entirely with
the others. That’s what that spread of green bars tells you.
And what makes the millennials claptrap all the more confounding is the fact that those little green bars,
shown above, are very often about the same size as the blue gen X-ers’ and the orange post-war baby
boomers’ bars. In other words, the supposedly different older cohorts are just as likely to agree with a
millennial as disagree. Rather than being some kind of drastically different group who share a completely
alternative mindset, your average millennial is just as likely to agree with her post-war grandfather as her
fellow millennial sister.
If your segment is populated by different people who want

different things, it is not a segment. It’s a joke and so are your
skills as a marketer.
All of this makes Air France’s new airline Joon a total non-starter from the beginning because if the
segment you are designing your offer for does not exist, all subsequent marketing bets are off. As any
well-trained marketer (hopefully you) knows, marketing is multiplicative. If the segmentation is wrong,
your targeting will always be wrong. That ruins your positioning and all the tactical decisions that follow it
in execution. Air France and KLM would be as well served to go after Librans because, unless you believe
in astrology, they are just about as uniform and meaningful in their desires as the so-called millennial
group.
My point is not just that focusing on millennials is a stupid, stupid approach to segmentation, but also that
it is a totally unacceptable and offensive stereotype in an era when such things are meant to be behind us.
How is it possible to celebrate the actions of the ASA in challenging the common, sexist assumptions made
about women in so much marketing while allowing a significant number of big companies to continue to
lump consumers together into a millennial segment based solely on a stupid, inaccurate age-based
assumption?
I might just as well decide to launch an airline targeting Scottish people called Jock in which all the crew
wear tartan, serve only whisky and deep-fried mars bars and keep the prices down because, as we all know,
the Scots like a bargain.
And why stop there? Let’s also create Rasta Airlines for Afro-Caribbean travellers. We will play Bob Marley
throughout the flight, paint the planes Rasta colours and make sure there is a reliable source of top quality
ganja to get you through the long flight ahead. Don’t worry about jet lag, by the time you get to your
destination with Rasta Airlines you won’t even know which century you’re in.
Yes, I know these are offensive ill-founded stereotypes. But they are no more stupid than bundling billions
of people together because of their birth year and assuming they all like digital stuff, connections, enjoying
quality moments and launching a new brand to offer the aforementioned nonsense in airline form.
We took one big step forward last week thanks to the ASA, and just as big a step backwards with Joon and
its ridiculous, offensively simplistic age-based stereotypes. For strategic reasons as much as politically
correct ones, if you cannot empirically show any meaningful differences between your target segment and
the other segments – or if it is populated by completely different people who want entirely different things
– your segment is not a segment. It’s a joke and so are your skills as a marketer.
Now, if you’ll excuse me I will leave it there. I’m booked on Rasta Airlines flight 423 to Jamaica and I like to
get on board nice and early so I can get as high as possible – long before take-off commences. Respect!
Mark Ritson is a former Marketing Professor, brand consultant and three time winner of
the PPA Business Columnist of the Year Award.
He now runs the Mini MBA in Marketing and Mini MBA in Brand Management courses:
https://mba.marketingweek.com/

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Only crap marketers

The ASA’s research into harmful gender

By Mark Ritson 26 Jul 2017

We took one big step forward

If your segment is populated by different people who want

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