Millennial Rules: How to Connect with the First Digitally Savvy Generation of Consumers and Employees

INTRODUCTION

Millennials and

the Cursive Code

It has been a digital day. My digital day started when I punched the keypad (digital) to open the garage door. The digital display on my bike showed 82 degrees, and it was not yet 6:30 a.m. As I rode down the street, I looked toward my grandkids' house and chuckled over the idea that an old-fashioned analog clock would be tough for them to read.

After my ride, I grabbed the newspaper on the way back into the house and couldn't help noticing how few houses in my neighborhood had a newspaper waiting on their front lawn. Not to worry; I could see an upstairs light on in the neighbor's house, a sure sign that Joe was awake and reading the paper online.

Back in my kitchen, I spotted a thank-you note our eighteen-year-old grandson had left on the counter. His neat printing gave away the fact that he is a Millennial. To him and the rest of his demographic cohort, cursive writing is as good as secret code.

As I opened the local paper, I was surprised to see I had been featured in an article on digital seniors. I knew I was digital but never thought of myself as a senior, being just over sixty. Senior is for old people, not me! Still, I realized my grandson didn't wonder what had happened to thermometers filled with shiny but toxic mercury, watches with or without hands, cameras with eight millimeter film, and television sets with vacuum tubes and knobs labeled horizontal hold. Though we are both digitally savvy, his generation doesn't remember any of these things. I shook my head, finished my reading, and spent the rest of the morning in my office surrounded by my digital toys.

Later that day, I drove into town for a city council meeting to review the plans for a new city hall. In spite of our careful planning, I suspected our new structure would be obsolete the day we opened its doors. Several years earlier, we had built our dream house in the Texas hill country. I had prematurely congratulated myself for having the foresight to install category 5 wiring only to discover that the world had gone wireless in the time it took to finish the house. I didn't know what surprises technology would have for our city project, but I was certain there would be something unexpected.

When the architect unveiled the artist's renderings of the new city hall, if you looked closely, you could see that one of the figures walking across the still-imagined campus was wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt and a knit cap pulled completely over his ears. I jokingly said to the architect, I see our new city hall campus comes complete with slackers.

Oh, we've got some young people in the art department, he said. I guess they were just having fun.

Well, those young people, just having fun, are about to take over the world—so the rest of us had better figure them out. Don't worry; they are smart and creative, and they seem to have their priorities straight. Best of all, they are amazingly tolerant of old people. (If you're one of them, thanks for that!)

Besides, if you want to fool with them, you can always leave them a note in cursive.

Is Your Tail on Fire?

Change is interesting or scary, depending on your personality. It's also inevitable.

My grandmother taught me about change. She died about thirty years before she quit breathing. For the last several decades of her life, she didn't try different food, sample new ideas, or let technology encroach on her life if she could avoid it. For the last thirty years, she only took up space.

The last thing I want is to be seen as an old guy who has stayed too long at the party. So I try to stay on the leading edge rather than play catch up. I try to live by the motto, If you aren't living on the edge, you are taking up too much space. Or, as pilots like to say, Live like your tail is on fire!

That's the way Millennials live—like their tails are on fire. They aren't going to trade their freedom to enjoy life for a comfortable corner office. Millennials are going to live until they die.

Some say we are about to enter a perfect storm of change, but really, we're already in the storm. Technology is advancing exponentially, and that means a digital generation has come of age while a generation of Boomers still clings to the executive washroom key. It is going to be a struggle of epic and historic proportions.

That brings us to the idea behind Invisible. As we'll see, research tells us that old-fashioned ideas of selling, serving, and marketing are going to need tweaking—or perhaps even a total overhaul. Customer service is changing, too. Today's consumer is more informed (thanks to the Internet) and isn't shy about negotiating. More surprising is the discovery that when customers want help, they want it now; but when they don't want help, they expect the sales staff to be invisible. These consumers have learned to think of customer service as a separate product that can be negotiated. They are increasingly comfortable being served by avatars and outsourced human customer service representatives. Finally, old ideas of marketing aren't going to work in this new age of social media. Yes, you can still market to your customers, but in the new age, the best marketing is going to be invisible.

In the following pages, you're going to learn about the Millennials and how they are impacting the older generations (Gen X, Boomers, and Traditionals). The Millennials are changing the way things get done and goods get sold. Older generations may interpret their approach as radical, but for the most part Millennials are simply finishing the job on changes that older, perhaps more cautious generations didn't have the courage to complete. There is much to learn from these new kids on the block, this odd collection of tattoos, piercings, and scared hair. Millennials represent the bulk of the most amazing generation of all, the first generation to conduct its social interactions via digital communications.

Does this mean the members of the old guard are slowly turning in their keys, heading into the sunset? No. They aren't, and that's one of the things that make our time so darned interesting. In spite of new technology, certain basic traits of human nature are still appreciated: storytelling, intimacy, and the joy of being pleasantly surprised. And although we're taking a lot of time to learn how to sell to Millennials, we'll end up doing a better job of selling and serving everyone else, too! Differences are fun to point out, but in the end, you will see that much of what we see as differences is really nothing more than a matter of context.

Caution: Trends Ahead

Trend spotting is not what it used to be. In the not-so-distant past, you could spot a trend from a mile away. Life today is changing so rapidly that the vantage point moves closer by the hour. The trends we spotlight here are not a mile away; they are upon us now. And if we don't react quickly, we are bound to get run over by our competition. To benefit from these trends, you must do the following:

•  Provide a service or product that can survive unbundling (something that is worth it on its own).

•  Be willing to personalize and customize like never before.

•  Market where your customers are.

•  Be proficient at recruiting, training, and leading a team of Millennials.

•  Do all of the preceding better and more efficiently than your competition.

•  Spread a little joy in the form of what we call Positively Outrageous Service (POS). You'll get the full definition of Positively Outrageous Service in chapter 7, but for now, let's just say that POS is service that makes you say WOW!

In later chapters, we will discuss the how-tos. We will go deep on how to sell and serve, but when it comes to quality and price, we can only share customers' opinions as to how your business measures up. With this base of information, it is up to you whether you rise or fall.

HOW I Learned to Love Millennials

A few words about some things you will find frequently in this book.

One is what I refer to as the research. Like the product of the 1960s that I am, I began this project as I have done so many times before—I headed to the public library. But like the New Age person I would like to be, I prepped for my library visits by repeated visits to Amazon.com. Amazon has become the modern-day equivalent of the card catalog. I skimmed books by the dozen, Googled constantly, and read blogs until they became a blur to see what others had to say about the subject; there's no point in writing a book that has already been written. My ultimate gut check came from blogging about my Millennial discoveries, and best of all, I conducted focus groups and impromptu interviews.

The actual research, much to my surprise, already had its foundation in the research I did in cooperation with BIGinsight for a book we cowrote, When Customers Talk. For that book, we polled just shy of ten thousand online consumers every month for forty-eight months and accumulated more than twelve million data points. When we resorted for generation cohorts, a ton of valuable information suddenly appeared as if by magic. We followed up with even more surveying pointed directly at the Millennials.

But my favorite research didn't begin until I had an attitude change. It's human nature to dismiss, avoid, or fear people and things that are different, and like my grandparents and yours, I had tossed all young people into the same box. Old people had taught me to shake my head and say, Kids these days . . .

Stop right there. Kids these days are as different one from another as their generation is different from the ones that preceded. If you want to get to know them, you have to talk to them. And that's what I did and will continue to do. That's also how I came to the conclusion that the Millennials are likely to become the most influential generation ever.

The most fun and thought-provoking research has been in the form of focus groups. I'll continue doing them at every opportunity. In a focus group, abetted by the dynamics of a small group, you pick up nuances. And Millennials will answer any question you are bold enough to ask. Killer!

I also want to introduce here a few key players you will meet time and again.

One of the really cool things about writing a book is that it is a built-in excuse for authors to call just about anybody, all in the name of