Research

Generation Generalisation: Targeting by Generation Does More Harm Than Good

Business people love to target by ‘Generation’. ‘Gen Z’, ‘Millennials’, ‘Gen X’, ‘Gen Alpha’ have all become convenient shorthands for talking about audiences. Like calling a child ‘naughty’ these labels are quick short hands with long term consequences. Generational tags hold the promise to make segmentation simple, offering tidy demographic boxes that allegedly explain how people think, behave or buy stuff.

For business people who love to tacitly play bullshit bingo, talking about “Gen Z” is another strategic amplifier – it makes board table conversations sound insightful and current. And frustratingly, the media pick up on this too… ‘work shy Millennials’; the ‘Burnout Generation’ and so on. Together the illusion is formed that age alone defines people’s outlook and choices.

The problem is, it’s not only lazy, more often than not, it’s factually wrong.

Three Big Problems

Firstly, generational labels ignore the immense diversity that exists within any age cohort. Treating Gen Z as a single segment assumes that a 22-year-old graduate in Manchester and a 22-year-old care worker in Cornwall share the same motivations and media habits — when they almost certainly don’t.

Secondly, these generational labels are always applied out of context. ‘Baby Boomer’ was first used in a 1963 article in the Daily Press. Gen X from a 1991 novel by Canadian, Douglas Coupland. Gen Alpha in 2008 by Australian researcher, Mark McCrindle.  So how are these sweeping generalisations relevant to someone in Barnsley, Crief or Newtonards?

Thirdly, there’s chicken and egg – this kind of targeting reinforces stereotypes and inherent biases. Older audiences are portrayed as brand loyal and tech illiterate. Young adults as work shy and low on attention. With these lazy generalisations the curiosity and connection with real people is lost and the tone of a business or brand becomes to objectify and talk down to the very audience it’s trying to engage with.Fourthly, people’s choices are far more influenced by what they can afford, the beliefs they hold, and what matters to them that when they were born.

Four Solutions

  • Segment by mindset, not year; identifying common attitudes, values, and needs across age groups.
  • Use rich contextual datato understand what people actually do, rather than assuming how they act based on their age.
  • Recognise fluid life stages. Someone renting their first flat or planning for retirement can belong to any generation.
  • Designing inclusively, so creative and messaging are accessible and relevant to all who share a motivation, not just those who share a date of birth.

How to Persuade Others

Challenging generational stereotypes takes tact, particularly because these labels are sticky. Start by using evidence, not opinion, facts not myths. In the UK we have research data from ONS, IPA or WARC, or indeed your own bespoke research, showing that attitudes differ more by income, education and worldview than by age.

And it’s important, because these beguiling clichés lead to lower opportunity. Understanding audiences as people, not categories, makes brands more inclusive, more empathetic, and ultimately more effective.

But more than this, the real irony is that in generalising by Generation, the opportunity becomes smaller not larger for brands. If you’re clear on your audience by attitude, beliefs and by simple economics, you open a bigger field of play and a bigger size of prize.

 

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy, innovation and brand planning company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success.  david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670;  www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh. © The Crow Flies, 2025

Burst the bubble: your brand isn’t important

Most people don’t think about your brand. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not even when you’re launching that campaign you’ve been working on for six months.

It can be a hard truth for brand builders and marketeers to hear, especially for senior stakeholders who live and breathe the brand every day. But it’s also the most liberating, powerful realisation you can have. Because when you stop assuming your brand is front-of-mind, you start seeing it through the eyes of real people. And that’s where better thinking begins.

The brand bubble is real
Inside most businesses, especially at leadership levels, the brand looms large. It’s the topic of internal presentations, strategy sessions, workshops, and debate. Over time, it becomes a self-reinforcing loop: the more you talk about the brand, the more important it feels. Soon, there’s a risk that decisions are made based on internal opinion, not external reality.

This is the brand bubble. And the only way to burst it is to re-anchor yourself through humility. To get real about how little time the average consumer spends thinking about your brand, and how low down their priority list it usually sits.

Why this is good news
At first, this might feel deflating. But it’s actually a good thing. Because when you realise your brand isn’t a daily obsession for most people, you start asking the right questions.

Instead of “what do we want to say?”, you ask “what will work in their world?”

Instead of “how do we get them to love us?”, you ask “how do we become useful, easy to choose, or more memorable?”

Instead of obsessing over tiny tonal shifts or logo placement, you focus on what truly matters to the people you’re trying to reach.

When the pressure to somehow be profound lifts, clarity emerges.

Proximity distortion
Marketing departments are often too immersed in their own messaging. It’s not vanity; it’s proximity. But proximity brings distortion. You start to mistake repetition for recognition, or attention for affection.

That’s why the most valuable mindset shift is to one of humble detachment.

Step back. Ask yourself: if you weren’t paid to care about this brand, would you? When you puncture that balloon, when you wear their shoes, you look at the world as it really is; messy, distracted, busy, full of competing priorities. And you start building brands that meet people in that reality, not the imagined one.

 

The higher you rise, the smaller the target
This isn’t just a job for insight teams or junior marketers. Senior stakeholders especially need consumer closeness. Because the higher up you go, the easier it is to drift away from real-world context.

It’s why some of the best brand leaders spend time on the shop floor, in people’s homes, or scrolling through Trustpilot comments. Not to chase trends, but to stay grounded. To avoid ivory tower thinking. To remember that marketing lives out in the world, not on slides.

 

And it’s not about lowering ambition, it’s about recalibrating it. Great brands aren’t the centre of their consumers’ lives they’re the reliable shortcuts that help us out in day-to-day. When you accept your place, you can show up with more relevance, more humility, and more impact. Your brand is not the hero in your customer’s story… they are. And that’s not a problem. That’s the brief.

Work out how to drop the ego, embrace humility, and focus on building brands that fit into real lives not just PowerPoint slides. Because in the end, being important to people starts by assuming that you’re not.

 

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success.  david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670 ; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh. © The Crow Flies, 2025

Crow Chronicle, Autumn 2025

The Crow Flies was born out of a fusion of client-side commerciality and agency-side creativity… how could we fuse both to help brands impact the market, with pace and purpose?

We’ve helped many companies and brands do that since we started over 10 years ago. From food to Pharma, drinks to DIY; from H.E. to apprenticeships, leisurewear to homeware, our approach is always to connecting the world of your target customer to the leverageable strengths of your brand.

Here’s a reminder of our areas of focus across market research, strategy, innovation and planning, and some of the ‘caw’ approaches we take to help you brand or business have foundations of stone.

That’s the way to stop the endless cycles of strategic debate, to align everyone behind the mission and invest every precious penny on impacting the market.

Get in touch if you’d like to chat more about a knotty challenge or exciting opportunity.

QUICK LINK HERE: Crow Chronicle, Autumn 2025

Crow Essentials / Research

We passed our 11th Birthday in December which is uncrowlievable… but it’s important to never assume that everyone knows what your company is and what it does. So here’s the first in a series of Crow ‘101’s which we’re putting out in our social feeds.

If you’ve got a brand building challenge and what a rigourous, pragmatic and pacey answer – get in touch (+44 (0) 7885 408367 or caw@thecrowflies.co.uk

So here we go, Crow ‘Basics’, part 1, with a little focus on how we help our clients with market research.

Brand Myth Busting

Companies have more data to hand than ever before; multiple sources, multiple dashboards enabling them to look at any one performance data point from a multiple of different angles. And every sale resulting in jillions of tonnes of data to the analysis pile.

Yet, despite this seeming richness, brand myths still abound in many companies. Brand myths that no amount of rational analysis seems to be able to shift. Brand myths that people either willingly accept, grudgingly accept, or circumnavigate. Myths that are are wasteful and potentially dangerous, because they can become a smoke screen, behind which the slow tides of change in the market place can go unnoticed, or false truths can become anchors that prevent necessary action, or channel investment and resource into the wrong things.

How, then, do brands and companies remove the myths? How do they allow the truth to shine through and future opportunities be seen and realised?  As with many things in life it involves going back to basics, in this case brand basics:

  1. Know your core target versus your source of business. This is really important to get right. Miss the bullseye of your core target and you will miss the fertile ground that understanding their attitudes and needs feed. And whilst consumer behaviour does not change overnight, subtle shifts can happen over time that if you are not checking in with your consumers can be missed and false assumptions can manifest in sub-optimal executions. This doesn’t mean ignoring your source of business – they are commercially important, but are likely to be more transient and focusing on them will dilute your brand proposition and strategy where it can really make a difference.

Action 1: generate and test alternative hypothesis to whom your core consumer is – age, needs, attitudes, occasions for engaging with your product based on clues you are seeing and have gathered from; other research you have done, trends, performance data or simply speaking to people you know.

Action 2: Identify and have a clear understanding of your source of business – subtle shifts in action planning can ensure this bucket remains topped up and you can focus on that part of them that can become the habitual consumers of the future.

  1. Being clear what your brand is. Everyone thinks they are clear on what their brand offers. But, with pressure to grow, incremental creep can mean that internal views of what the brand is can be very different to how a consumer sees it.  Just because your brand can launch into multiple categories doesn’t mean it should. Indeed, by being clear on what your brand is means it can be more successful and selective in the categories it extends in to.

Action: does the consumer view on what your brand is match the interval view? If not, why not, and take the action to align them. Brands can only be built successfully when all audiences agree on what the brand is.

  1. Brand thinking and understanding never stops but the final brand basic is knowing the benefits and ‘reasons to believe’ that really resonate with your core audience, and are properly grounded in a product truth.

Action: understand whether your brand benefits and RTB’s are as compelling as they should be. Are they expressed in the right way, do they really deliver against the wants and needs of your target audience?

If you need help cutting through the data, or challenging the brand myths that have built up in your business over time, get in touch. They can often be the biggest impediment to future growth – get your house in order however, and you have a chance.

Gael Laurie is Brand Building Director of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success.  gael@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1283 295100; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh. © The Crow Flies, 2024

New innovation launch for Florette: Gourmet Slaws

We loved working with the green-fingered team at Florette UK&I on the idea generation and concept development for the new Gourmet Slaw range, launching today in Sainsbury’s, and next month in Tesco, Booths (and more to follow).

The insight revealed a simple unmet need: people like coleslaw but get frustrated that too often, they’re pretty bland and often slathered in cheap mock-mayonnaise.

Not these: three flavours; fresh ingredients… ready to make or complete any meal, from a light lunch to a tasty dinner.  So cawsome, they’re slawsome!
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If you’re looking to develop new products so good they should be against the s-law, get in touch!

Not All Insights Are Created Equal

Debate and opinion on insights in marketing orientates around three topics. One, whether a business or brand is market-orientated at all, and how it becomes it. Two, how to gather insights. And three, debates about whether ‘insights’ are actually ‘insights’ at all or merely ‘data’, ‘observations’ or ‘truisms’ (and therefore somehow of less value). Enough indeed, for a Chapter each in the not-yet-started-or-frankly-needed, Crow Marketing Text Book.

What isn’t discussed is the utility of your insights. This tends to be assumed, but it would be incorrect to do so. A suite of insights that have been developed or identified for the brand are exploitable in different ways and in different degrees. In effect, insights are not created equal – deciding which to use and leverage is the one of the critical transition points between strategy and action.

Start with the brand positioning: if leveraging the insight creates dissonance with the task of refreshing or reinforcing what the brand stands for, then stop – you’re about to waste effort and resource.

Next, consider whether the insight is emergent – too often, it’s easy to be beguiled by a trend that seems exciting and new, but in fact isn’t scalable – at least not yet. Here, have a watching brief and bide your time.

Conversely, watch for being late to the party, when the words “we have to…” are being used around the business. You may have identified an insight whose time is passing and is beginning to recede. The risk here is that you spend resource on something that isn’t ownable and so doesn’t benefit the brand long term.

Discussing choosing between insights may seem counter-intuitive… after all, there’s an almost unstated assumption that insights are semi-mystical entities only capable of being found when you’re in the bath or when an apple drops on your head – neither of which are particularly likely to happen on a Teams call (at least not with the cameras on). And it isn’t true. Insights can be built and developed through being observant, curious, challenging and testing.

That’s when the real challenge emerges in insight: which will best help me grow my brand?

 

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success. For a different take on insights: david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh. Copyright 2024

Why Corporate Claptrap is really bad for brands

Whilst doom-scrolling on Linked In early one morning, an article from The Economist caught my eye. It’s a theme we’ve been coming back to over many years – how company employees begin to talk utter claptrap very quickly after starting in the business world, and how, viewing this through a marketing lens, this is really bad for brands (it’s bad, full stop, but that’s for another post).  We wrote about in 2018, and the post is presented again below.

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We’ve been ‘peeling back the onion’, we’ve had a bit of an ‘idea shower’ and we’ve got something we want to ‘run up the flagpole’ – something that we’re ‘110% frustrated’ by. This post is about the terrible curse of Corporate Claptrap.

The truth is that using corporate language is almost inescapable and virtually unavoidable given how much time we spend at work. It’s engrained in organisations’ cultures. The first time we hear it we’re confused – it makes no sense – but before we know it we find ourselves ‘road mapping’, ‘shifting paradigms’ and ‘burning the boats’.

However, finally, thankfully, a few organisations are beginning to call it out for what it is: an issue that negatively impacts business and the engagement of those working within it… but we’d go further. We’ve ‘touched base offline’ with brand owners taken a ‘helicopter view’ of the research and concluded that it’s also damaging for brands and brand building. Why? Well as management Professor Jennifer Chatman of Haas School of Business recently wrote, “jargon masks real meaning”. And when it comes to brand building, establishing real meaning is what it’s all about…

The heart of the issue lies in the complexity of the human language. Unlike other animals, our language is more than systematic noise grunted to one another (teenagers excepted). It contains cultural meaning and, critically, spoken words also communicate unspoken meaning. Our language therefore becomes a filter that processes our understanding and influences how we behave beyond our conscious awareness. That sounds high-fallutin’, but consider these three brand-damaging implications.

Claptrap is a barrier to understanding
Claptrap stops us from being close enough to our consumers. As corporate language becomes engrained in a business, the culture of that business shifts with it. With every reference to ‘building a strawman’, every generous delivery of a ‘heads up’ or ‘reach out’, with every meeting that starts with ‘getting people aligned’ and finishes with a ‘hard close’ at ‘the end of play’; for every ‘mission critical’ task, for every concept that gets ‘dropped in the pan to see if it floats’; for every ‘deck of slides’, ‘turd polisher’, ‘clocksucker’ or ‘boiling of the ocean’ and every ‘re-stage’, ‘re-purpose’ or resodding anything… we move further and further away from the people that really matter: consumers.

The key to brand building lies in truly understanding your consumer, their needs, their frustrations, their problems, their hopes and their motivations. When you’re engrained in a business this is tough at the best of times. Why, then, would we accept the use of a language that further divorces us from the world our consumers live in and cements an ivory-tower world- view?

Claptrap prevents action
Claptrap delays action and excuses procrastination. We would never undervalue the need for stakeholder alignment. However, the business language often becomes the hiding place for inaction as the need to ‘onboard decision makers’ is used to excuse the adding of weeks or months of unnecessary delay into business. And as inaction becomes the norm, the business language explains it away: we need to ‘put our foot on the ball’ in order to deliver a plan that will ‘move the needle’ or, we need to ‘deep dive’ further to ensure that the sales team’s concerns are ‘on the radar’. Yes, debate is needed; of course we shouldn’t rush into action without consideration; but great brands never forget that impacting their end consumer is the only thing that counts. Anything that stops that is a waste.

Claptrap creates groupthink
Claptrap creates unwritten rules about behaviour that hinder progress. Next time you hear a presentation from the company owner or CEO, listen out for how many of the phrases that they use quickly enter common parlance. People adopt the same language to show support, to tow the line and to fit in. People naturally shy away from standing out (unwittingly or not). This can be a great and powerful thing. However, if the language used is convoluted and idiosyncratic (Corporate Claptrap) then nobody asks the simple, basic brand building questions for fear of looking stupid.

This is so dangerous for brands because the questions that make the biggest difference in marketing are the childish ones, the ones that are brutally simple and disarming. The language that drives the greatest change is often the Bluntest, yet in Corporate Claptrap Land, people are inadvertently dissuaded from using it.

So try binning the business language, pick up your brand plan and embrace your inner-child. Ask the simplest questions:

Will this make a difference?
Do we really have to do that?
What would happen if we didn’t do it?
Why can’t we do it now?
Why can’t we do it bigger?

You’ll be amazed how quickly you release the ‘sleeping giant’ in your brand…

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If you want help cutting through the B.S. and getting to the heart of it, get in touch.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success.  david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh. © The Crow Flies, 2023

Brand humility

When managing brands client-side, I used to advise every new starter in the marketing team to write down all their associations with the brand on their starting day, particularly so if they were new to the company, and keep it for future reference.

Because from that day forward, their immersion into a biased world would begin – both overtly, being professional and getting thoroughly up to speed with the brand, and tacitly, taking on (typically non-consciously) the cultural or group beliefs, myths, opinions and legends of that brand, like layers accreting one upon the next.

Much of the immersion is required to run the brand of course. And much is positive; after all, if a Brand Manager can’t champion a brand, who the heck can? But many of those layers – and it can be difficult to spot which – become biases or curved lenses which distort the truth. And distortions of the truth mean that you can’t easily stand back and have an honest, objective, critical awareness of the brand and how it’s really standing relative to the other players and competitors.

So view your brand with humility. Ensure that you are researching the brand well and researching it with dispassion and regularity, giving yourself the tools to more accurately wear your target consumers’ shoes, even if they do whiff a bit. Yes, publicly beat the drum; but privately be tough on the brand. That’s the path to making the best decisions.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success.  david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh. © The Crow Flies, 2023