Welcome to the Virtual Generation

Gen X? Old fashioned. Gen Y? Obsolete. Let’s talk about Generation V.

My son, who’s 5 years old and searches The Wiggles web site for new movies, is a member. So is your 70-year-old aunt who sends you an Amazon gift certificate for the holidays and leaves book reviews every time she logs in. As defined by Gartner, Generation V — for Virtual — represents the blending of behavior, attitudes and interests that happens in an online environment.

“For Generation V, the virtual environment provides many aspects of a level playing field, where age, gender, class and income of individuals are less important and less rewarded than competence, motivation and effort,” said Adam Sarner, principal analyst at Gartner. “For example, an 11-year old individual can be the leading ‘go to’ person for advice on how to upgrade/hack a digital video recorder (DVR) for more recording space. An unpopular office worker can be a highly revered, accomplished 40th-level half-elf in World of Warcraft. The opportunity for reputation, prestige, influence and personal growth provides a powerful social draw for the masses to spend more time in a virtual world.”

The analyst firm predicts, in fact, that in a mere eight years, more money will be spent marketing and selling to anonymous online personas than marketing and selling offline (which doesn’t bode well for big improvements in customer service at the stores we patronize…).

What does this mean for those of us who rely on the web for our livelihood? First, we need to persuade decision-makers to turn in their copies of The One to One Future, which, after all, was published 11 years ago.

Next, according to Gartner, you need to “shift from collecting personal data about individual customers toward collecting more complete and more relevant data around online customer behavior and influence on others.” Forget about demographic information. Seek psychographic insight — personality, values, attitudes, opinions.

As Sarner explained, “Although the real person may never be known, far more intimate information of the persona’s actions, personality, lifestyle habits and attitudes can be collected and exploited for business goals.”

He has some advice for targeting Generation V:

• Organize products and services around multiple online personas — a topic we’ve covered before.
• Sell to the persona, not the person. A persona will show you how it wants to be treated.
• Create virtual environments as a way to orchestrate customer exploration toward purchases.
• Shift investment from known customers to unknown ones. Focus on the “influencers.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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