Famed author F. Scott Fitzgerald became a college-age spokesman, nearly 100 years ago, of a generation that partied wildly before, during and after our last gasp of irrational exuberance—the one preceding the Great Depression.
 
As we attempt to recover from the current Great Recession, it’s interesting to look back at Fitzgerald’s descriptions of the youth of his time. A sort of déjà vu all over again, as Americans like to say.

Echoes of the same manic desire to gather, drink, dance, dress, party, talk and play as if there were no tomorrow can be found in today’s late teen / early twenty-something behavior. But in this latest incarnation of the jazz age, a rebellion born of lost ideals has been replaced by an almost overwhelming buy in of a brand-driven lifestyle.
 
And why not? After all, it was this lifestyle that characterized the boom period during which the youngest Gen Ys entered existence. Nothing so far, not even the September 08 bust, has dampened its hold over the young.

 

They are the first to be raised primarily by career couples with disposable income—parents who took their cues from What Every Baby Knows on TV rather than the staid and predictable Dr. Spock manual. Coddled from birth in designer clothes and cushy Japanese strollers, able to click “File / Open” on a Mac before reading a book, these babies cut their teeth on Nick@Nite and came of age with the social network.
 
The result: exactly what one would expect, a brand-aware, media-hungry generation looking for its place in the world and ready to call the shots. Accustomed to being marketed to, it is a demographic that sees life as imitating art—commercial art. They want what is beautiful, immediate, accessible, and fun. Especially if it’s free.
 
Often, that means media, something Gen Y expects to consume a great deal of and pay very little for, at least in terms of cash out of pocket. Technology is its weapon of choice, and in the great symbiotic trench wars of technology and content, techno-enabled free downloads gain ground one day, ad-supported / paid content delivery the next. What’s left is a muddy, treeless no-man’s land, over which content providers, advertisers, and information deliverers scratch their heads and look for peace.

Twenty-somethings are a marketer’s target, and they know it. They may face a world that has overspent itself and hasn’t provided enough jobs for them, but they also understand the true power of their generation: to give or withhold lifelong loyalty to a brand.
 
Whatever lifelong brand loyalty means these days. It could be shorter than The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. But that’s another story. And another author from the 20th century jazz age….whose work may be read on a Kindle someday by a Gen Y Millennial because Google put it out in the cloud—for free.

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."