I work in Books. So the continual question of Are bookstores still valid? is ever present. Do you have an online presence? If you don't, you must be sunk. How is your social media? How many followers? And the always grody question: Are you hip with the young kids? (Gag me with a spoon, but it had to be said.) Those young kids now being Millennials. And everyone is scrambling to find out who they are, what they like, how to tap into their world. They are as big as the Baby Boomers are. My generation is sandwiched between 2 incredible, vastly different buying super powers.
At my job, our Marketing Dept is also having an on-going brainstorm about Millennials and just like every church seems to be, we are trying to figure out how to draw in young people. People not necessarily attached to their parents.
It started with this idea of M's rejuvenating local shopping and neighborhood places. Independent bookstores are seeing an upswing if you can believe it. More are opening, and more of those by young people. It's natural; people grow up and eventually start to do adult things. But there has been a marked revitalization of a neighborhood mentality, of community, of shopping locally, keeping dollars in the area, partly because of this younger crowd. I came of age with big box stores being awesome, then the fight to keep the little guys. M's have grown up with an easy balance between online shopping, (not the horror to them it was to some of us,) and local stores.
Our discussion evolved to coming off the idea of your choices and habits being open to the possibility of being "hacked"--not literally, more that your options are subject to someone else's preferences than your own--by the new Amazon practice of allowing anyone to win the bid on a Buy button, possibly pushing publishers off of their own book sales.
One coworker commented that Millennials think nothing of the fact that once you put it out there, yeah, it's on the internet, so what? because they have grown up with this. People of even slightly older generations might be worried about their information being actually hacked, or find the notion that choices are being fed to them via unseen algorithms disconcerting, but Millennials accept this and even use it themselves, or appreciate the suggestions. Not that they are mindless--not at all. They are simply aware that this is the process and are unafraid of it. Older generations are alarmed at finding themselves in an information bubble whereas Millennials are like "Duh. Of course there are bubbles."
So, to continue this thread, I had a new idea to throw into the mix:
If Millennials have grown up in this way, with a greater awareness and acceptance of this, does it also make them more capable of unplugging? For example, is unplugging as natural for them as their acceptance of internet culture? Are they better at it because it's natural?
And does that inform our marketing efforts of physical books, an atmosphere, a non-internet experience, when they choose to have it?
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