#24 - Beyond the Labels: How Generational Traits Shift as We Age

As each generation ages, the way they see the world—and the way the world sees them—changes. In this episode, we explore the shifting mindsets of generations as they migrate into new age groups. From the Silent Generation to Gen Alpha, we break down their formative experiences, cultural touch points, and evolving relationship with technology and trust. This isn’t just a history lesson—it’s a look at how generational identity is never fixed, but constantly reshaped by time, culture, and circumstance. Whether you’re curious about how Boomers view digital life, why Gen X remains skeptical, or how Gen Z is redefining connection, this episode provides a clear chart and conversation that help decode the forces behind generational change.

Transcript

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You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host,

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Ken Carroll. Who are you really targeting in this episode of Over the Bull? Hi, I'm Ken. If you hear some noises in the background, I've got several bits of data that I'm going to be referring to. And I just thought it'd be really interesting to let's talk about the age of the people that you're trying to target for your business. Now, the reason I wanted to do this was I was inspired because, you know, there are certain things that happen when you're trying to explore doing marketing and do marketing is a fun term in itself, isn't it? But the idea is that as you're working with a client to figure out what you're doing, one of the topics that comes up is the age group of the people you're trying to target. For example, if you were to target, say, 35-year-old, you know, 35, 40, you know, 44, whatever age group, you assume certain things. And when I say you, it's me too. We assume that it's possibly the same 35 year old that was the 35 year old 10 years ago. Meaning that people naturally evolved to have the same attributes as the previous generation once they hit a certain age. However, this is false. Every generation forms and changes based upon their influences and what they've been through. So targeting the 35 year old today is a lot different than targeting the 35-year-old of 10 years ago because they've gone through different things. They've seen different things. They've experienced different things. And so collectively, what we could say is that the 35-year-old changes, the 45-year-old changes, et cetera, et cetera. So what I thought would be kind of fun is to kind of put this in perspective. And let's break down each one of the generations and what what they were influenced by. And then what you can see is kind of how that baton is being passed from generation. What I mean by that is not adopting the same thing, but how previous generation and what they went through affects the next generation. And then, of course, there are huge advents in recent history where if we take the beginning of the cell phone, iPads, tablets, It's the internet technology, and now we have artificial intelligence. What you can see is that the ripples that happen due to different age groups and what they've been exposed to kind of forms the way they perceive the world around them, and it also kind of solidifies in general certain qualities of different age groups. Now, this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the totality of the argument. You know, it's like what we're focusing on if we were baking a cake is maybe we're focusing on the icing today. Or maybe we're focusing on a different part of the cake, you know, the decorations. But there's a lot more to the cake. For example, if you were to take someone who is in an urban area versus, say, you know, someone who's more rural, what you could see is that that influence could also influence how they see things. And so... one thing that's really important is to make sure you're working with someone who understands where you're at and what you do, because those nuances could be missed from a person that maybe doesn't live in the area. And there's a lot of nuances to that, but I don't want to go too far down that rabbit trail. So anyway, let's talk a what changes with those people. So if we start off with the first group, what I'm going to do is talk to you about the silent generation. So the silent generation, 1928 to 1945, and we're talking these are 80-year-old to 97-year-old people. Now, their core identifiers, they're traditionalist, they're civic-minded, they value loyalty and duty. And so you see that this generation has a very locked-in perception of the way they see the world. Now, what formed that mindset were things like the Great Depression, World War II, radio, and early mass manufacturing. Now, they're also skeptical of rapid change. They tend to trust institutions And low digital exposure is part of what they have. So you could imagine that if you're coming from a background where there's scarcity, like, for example, if you take the Great Depression, the whole banking collapse and all that, and then you move into the unknown of World War II, and now we have the beginning of the radio where that's a source of information. And then we had this early manufacturing. So what you could see is how they would value maybe jobs. Like my dad, he was born in 1936. My dad, for example, one of the things he really tried to enforce on me when I was young was the idea to get a job, to keep that job and retire. Work that job your whole life. Now, dad, because of where he was, the world was a lot different. Back then, when you had people who had loyalty to their employees and employees' loyalty to their employers, then to take them through a lifetime of stability was important to the employer and to the employee being dedicated to working hard for the employer was something that they both valued. And so it was symbiotic can it work? While if you look at some of the more modern advents of business, you'll see that there's a lot of instability and that concept of loyalty and that high value, that high ethical system is more going out the window for a lot of people. And what they simply look at is, you know, if I'm paying Bob X number of dollars and I can replace Bob with an AI system or I can replace Bob with a younger person, then I'm I saved that money. So you see that the way that it's evolved over the years makes the idea of keeping the same job for your entire life less viable, and it changes the way that you see the world, you see. But the silent generation would have been a lot different experience, and that particular modality would have been more viable for that generation. Now, if we move on to the baby boomers. So we're talking 1946 to 1964. So you're seeing this age group is 61 to 79 years old. So they're quickly replacing the silent generation. Now, they had post-war optimism, they were career focused, and they value security and status. So if we look at the previous generation, think about what they went through. The Great Depression and World War II. a lot of instability, a lot of unknowns, a lot of question marks. And so then you take the next generation who was influenced by the previous generation. They value this idea of being important. They value this concept of being secure because there was so much insecurity from the previous generation. So you see, it's not a siloed event. People are influenced by what they grew up with. Now, if we move on, we can see that the formation of their group would have been post-World War II boom. Television, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Cold War. Now, If we look at where they are in the digital landscape, they generally trust traditional institutions. They're cautious, but adapted to the digital atmosphere later in life. So you're seeing that, you know, where they're coming from. You know, they want to be relevant. They want to have status, this group. And by having status, part of that is they don't want to feel like that they're there. mother or dad, they want to feel like that they're current because that feeds this idea of security and status. They don't want to look like they're inept. And so by doing that, you're seeing the adaptation, but you're also seeing what they value. So if you're targeting the baby boomer group, you want to build a system that does instill a high sense of security and status and trust. And you want to give them that sense of that optimism that they desperately want that were ingrained in their formative years. So as you can see, targeting the silent generation versus the boomers would be significantly different. And then, of course, that's based upon what they've been through. We tend to think that people are siloed and that somehow they just developed a certain sense or a certain attitude toward things just because they did what they did. However, when you look at the broader culture influence, that's one thing that does it. But then also within a subset of that, you have two different groups, right? Like if you were either can migrate toward what your parents did or you can migrate and do the opposite of what your parents did. And some of that boils down to personal, personal, whatever, whatever does that to people. But there is this thought that at least when you look at it from this big perspective of what they've been through and the expectation, then you could start start building things more toward it. Now, if you start looking at this, then what you can also say is that if I was building a system for the silent generation versus the boomers, and then the boomers are replacing the silent generation, I've just become irrelevant. You see, this is why your web and your marketing plan always has to evolve because the age groups change and the expectations of those age groups change too. So let's move on to generation X. So Generation X is between the years 1965 and 1980, and now it's 45 to 60-year-olds. Independent, skeptical, hardworking, and they try to balance life and pragmatism. Now, the influence of this generation are personal computers. MTV, believe it or not, is a big one. The end of the Cold War, and we had this concept of dual income households. So let's move on and we'll kind of break this down a little bit. Now, the thing about this generation is they're skeptical of authority, moderate digital trust, but wary of surveillance and ads. And so the idea is that as this stuff started happening, so you could imagine that people wanting to cling on to something because once thing, like if you research things like the Hegelian dialect and things like that, you find that people, when they're in a bad situation, they tend to go toward what they think is safe. And so if you were to take, say, the silent generation, and then you see the ramifications that would have on the boomers, and then you take the boomers, and you put that into Generation X, you can see how that evolves from wanting to clamor to radio or things that make me feel like that I'm safe to where then there becomes this idea that, well, maybe I can't trust the people that my mom and my dad trusted. And so then what happens is, is you start to realize things like you start to realize that if you see an ad for detergent and they're making a call or a plead that they're they're somehow tied into some moral calls, which I'm not saying they are or they're not, but more than likely they're not, what they're doing is find a weakness and then trying to target that audience either through making it look like they're empathetic toward that audience or whatever. But what they're doing essentially is they're trying to manipulate you. And so when they try to manipulate you, what happened was is that the generation prior to Gen X, they would be more susceptible to possibly following that if it's an authoritative or a trusted brand. While as Generation X evolves into it, that's my generation, we become more skeptical of those things. And we go, well, of course they're saying that they do that, but we understand they have board members and we understand that their value system is not the value system of the silent generation. And so the way that we look at them is that they're trying to manipulate us. And again, generalities, right? But just think about that a little bit. And so how do you do that? Well, what you'll see is a trend here from trust and thinking that everyone thinks like, you know, an ethical, honest person to where now we realize that not everybody thinks the same way and not everybody does the same thing in the same fashion. All right, so let's move on here real quick. So then after Generation X, we have what we call the millennial generation, Gen Y, so to speak. This is 1981 to 1996. So think about this. These are the 30s. These are the group. This is that spot that most businesses think about, 29 to 44-year-old. Now, we tend to think this generation has more disposable income. And so if you were targeting the 35-year-old just 10 years ago, you were targeting Gen X, right? But now you're targeting Gen Y, the millennials. Now, let's talk about some of their core identifiers. This group is tech adopted. They value experiences, diversity, and flexibility. So you could imagine just reading that, what they would want as an offering versus versus what the Gen X would want as an offering if they want that more flexibility and diversity. And you're seeing that this idea of status is kind of waning and people are changing the way that they value things. So what influenced the Gen Y group? So the internet boom, right? I mean, if you look at 1981 to 1996, just think of the evolution of the internet during that time. And then we have, of course, 9-11. You know, 9-11 is one of those things that really impacted a lot of people in how they perceived the safety of their existence and also probably gave them a sense of– maybe a little bit of Americana, you know, coming back to people, you know, wanting to defend the homeland of their parents and grandparents. Then we have social media rise. I mean, social media was popping up about that time. You know, we had, what was the one, MySpace, you know, and we had certain one of those and Minespring and, you know, all these crazy things that were up at the time. And some fell and some rose. And then people were starting to get used to this. And then also, if you think about it, the people that made it were learning how to get people to spend more time on their social media platforms. And of course, that's evolved over time to where now you can almost look at this dopamine-style approach that social media companies take, which is why there's a scrolling, where you're always looking for that next video, that next dopamine hit. Yeah. you know, that kind of satisfies, kind of scratches that itch and it makes you want to find that other video and then keep going and going, which kind of like bottles you in to social media today. This is not an accident, in my opinion. This is absolutely deliberate. And, you know, so anyway, let's move on. And then global recession, if you remember, we were impacted by that. Now, where are they as far as the digital landscape. So they're digitally adaptive. They trust social media for connection, but are aware of misinformation. Now, I'm not a big fan of these words, misinformation and disinformation, because I'm Gen X. I like to call things as they are. I think those are fancy words to basically subset the word lie and make people feel that there's some kind of variation of the word lie. So it needs multiple definitions So I'm not real big into that terminology, but it did bring up a mode of skepticism. And so as you look at that, then you start to go, okay, well, what does that mean for that generation? Because remember, these are 35-year-olds. And so as they're starting to look at this more conspiracy style, and I don't mean that in a negative term, because if you look at the word conspiracy, that's a legitimate term. This term was actually militarized. It's not subjective. It was actually known that this term was used to marginalize certain thought that kind of got outside the box. And if you go back and look, you can see that it's objectively true that terms like conspiracy theory were used to make people not trust certain people who had certain views. Now, I don't mean that the conspiracy is Theories are true or false or anything like that. It just means that the actual terminology was used as a manipulative tactic. Now, does that mean that, you know, we take something that they've been through and then we go, well, they're aware of this? Well, yeah, they're aware of it. And probably because the previous generations, you know, they go, oh, hold on a minute. Maybe this is how this is. And, you know, we become this idea of being skeptical of authority anyway. And then we take that and then that influences the next generation. So you can kind of see how that waterfall just kind of trickles down further the more that you go. Now, let's move on here. Let's talk about Gen Z. Okay, so now we have Gen Z and we're looking at 1997 to 2012. So these are your 13-year-olds to 28-year-olds. Now, we're moving now to the world of digital natives. And then you're seeing that they're more aware of social awareness, obviously, and entrepreneur and pragmatic. Now, if we look at some of their core identities, let's look at some of their formative influences, smartphones, social media dominance, climate debates. And there's one more here, gig economy. I don't know why I put that down there. We'll just kind of let that sit. because I just want to keep moving. And so they're also digital natives, high usage, but strong skepticism toward institutions and ads. So what you're seeing is that at some point between the silent generation and Gen Z, what you're seeing is that people are now looking because, and I think part of it's because you're so inundated with advertising that you can't help but to see the idea that you're being manipulated one way or another. You're manipulated into thinking if you get the latest smartphone that somehow you're going to be a cooler person or whatever the case may be. But you're seeing more and more of that. And so the more that you become aware of the manipulation, the more that you're resistant to it because people don't want to be manipulated. So if you were to take, for example, Edward Bernays, there was a famous story about Edward Bernays and how he got females to start smoking. And the reason that he did it was because, one, he was contracted to get women to start smoking, but he didn't say start smoking. What he did was he said, these are torches of freedom because equality for women was huge back in the days of Edward Bernays. It was like one of those turning points. And so what he did was he actually used that as a manipulative tactic and then coerced women to start smoking cigarettes because they saw it as an act of being conformed or being on the same level or as males. And so when you look at things like that, you go like in their day, they didn't think that. They thought, you know, this is me kind of rebelling at the system that they felt was not giving them an equal shake. And so then what they did was they started smoking. Now, if we look at that today, we go, wow, that was really manipulative and probably dangerous. And it kind of messed up a lot of stuff. Well, then you fast forward and then we see by Gen X, you're starting to see this idea of the husband and the wife going to work. So you can see that the family structure breaks down. The mother's influence on her children has changed dramatically. And then we know that, you know, having two people work means more income, more taxes, all those things. And so then we start to think about, okay, well, is that part of what was going on here as people were being manipulated into other things? And then, of course, when people in authority abuse their power, then we start to see that, especially the more that it happens and the more it's reported. And then you see that there's multiple perspectives. So you start to see And then, of course, then you're also having the rise of alternative media. Like, for example, it's very common for someone to say that CNN or Fox or MSNBC is legacy media. And then there are influences that push them versus alternative people, you know, alternative groups that have popped up across the Internet. And so then they're seeing as being more legitimate and honest. And we see the legacy media is toting the line. And so you can see, if I just kind of dive into the mindset of the world and the soup of humanity that's happened since the 1900s, you can see that each one of these generations impacted the next generation. But then the next generation, due to the digital landscape and everything that's happened, they've changed how they see the world too. And so to dissect that is extremely important, especially if you're trying to reach a certain audience. And we're seeing that being who you are is more important. You know, it's almost like people want to hear someone cough or someone with a normal voice or someone who's just kind of saying what they think, because there's an authenticness when someone just says what they think, rather than trying to be very careful and manipulate words and manipulate a situation. which, by the way, we're in the middle of some huge updates. We're actually moving from one partner to the next for that very situation. What we found is that businesses, a lot of businesses, not all businesses, because I know a lot of really ethical, honest people, but a lot of these big corporate businesses, what they've done was they take this legal word salad mentality, and what they do is they They try to, rather than fix the problem, they try to fix the perception of the problem. And they try to manipulate you into thinking that it's not them, but it's some other situation. Like our hosting situation, in my opinion, is absolutely one of those where we're dramatically changing and we're going to have 100%, not 99% uptime. Yeah, you heard me right, 100%, which that SLA is a lot different than 99%, because that's another example. You take where they say, hosting company says, well, we'll give you 99% uptime guarantee. We've run those tests. And what we find is that that guarantee is month to month. And so all that means is, is they take you down for five hours in one month, their guarantee just says, we'll pay you for the month. But you could imagine how bad that would be to be down for five hours in a given month And then they'll give you back a few bucks, uh, to compensate you for all that time. You could imagine that's very manipulative in my opinion. And so I don't like playing those kinds of games, but when you see those things going on and then, then as generations are coming up into it and they're like, Hey, hold on a minute. These aren't the good guys just because they have this big polished brand don't mean that they're this, they could be that. And so then the idea idea of bigger does not necessarily mean more trusted. Now, you can imagine as a small business the opportunity that you could have here by just simply being honest and ethical. You know, we have clients come in. One of the things I love to do is talk about what Google posts in terms of the effectiveness of Google ads because people have a perception that I run ads on Google that somehow it's just going to reign in business. Well, that's not true. I mean, in the last podcast, we talked about one example where we had, where Ryan was, what, 12 weeks, 12 weeks running Google Ads, and then he started to see some really nice success from it. Well, that doesn't mean that that success will continue, but it also means that if he pulled the plug on week 11, that he may not have experienced the same thing. So, as you can see, this discussion is more of, well, how does the mind work and how does our generations influenced? And so you look at the 13 to 28 year old, you know, in just seven years, we're talking to 35 year olds. So you can imagine how dramatically different you need to approach people. Now, if we look at the digital landscape, this is kind of cool, actually, because it's almost like ethical and honesty and candid and being who you are is becoming in fashion again. You know, at some point we're trying to mask all that stuff, right? And make ourselves seem like something that we're not. But with the advent of the internet and AI specifically, not the internet, but the advent of artificial intelligence, while it can be promising, it could also be an absolute backfire in this situation. Like, I'll give you a couple of examples. AI have values more discussionary conversations and they value EEAT concepts. You can Google that. We've done some podcasts on it. So they value these things. However, so it's a great opportunity to be yourself and to be authentic and to, you know, shed this concept of I'm something that I'm not or I'm trying to present something that I'm not. One of the best things you could do is be honest with people today. That's where everything's moving too. And I think that's brilliant because we've been trying to do that for 20 years and we still battle all these companies that are over promising junk and just trying to sell something and then manipulate situations and all those things. But as we're moving into it, there's also a potential extreme backlash with AI because AI is not a sentient human being. I mean, it does not think for itself. It filters and us things based on what the programmers tell it to do. They could be influenced by a lot of different factors, both philosophically from their creators, but also from the demands of maybe legal constraints. Now, with that being said, I can tell you that I have had conversations with different AI models, and I intentionally talk about something that's controversial. Not so much that I'm trying to get it out of the system, but I want to go does it give me both sides of the equation? Especially if I attack something like, say, for example, the pharmaceutical industry, like I'm going skeptical of that. And then what I found was these AI models, what they do is they'll actually tote the line of the mainstream narrative. So it'd be the equivalent of asking about cigarette smoking, and all they do is give you Philip Morris quotes. You're not going to trust that AI model when you see that. And And so unless there's a change in AI being able to give both sides of the equation and give them a fair handshake, I really don't know how it's going to be adopted. Because what's interesting is if you take a guy like Christopher Hitchens, he was a prominent atheist. One thing he talked about was he says we're pattern-seeking mammals. And I remember that. I remember that in one of his debates, and I thought that was really brilliant. You know, like we see puppy dogs and clouds and elephants and clouds and things like that. It's because we are pattern-seeking mammals. Now, of course, I think that human beings are more than just the byproduct of meaningless evolution. I can't see that. I can't turn the corner on that. But his point was noted. Okay, so what we are seeing, too, is that the generations now, especially the younger generations, is becoming hypersensitive to the idea of AI content. So there's a whole other aspect to this because AI content equals untrue, unauthentic, un-E-E-A-T. So if AI doesn't get its act together and starts giving the full perspective, one of two things is going to happen. People are going to become more brainwashed to one view, which would give unimaginable power the people who are you're seeing that the desire of man and the flawed aspect of man always comes full circle into this. It's not like we can create something that's beyond what we perceive. And if you also look at these generations, if you really want to dig back into it, look at the value system of the 1900s and 1920s and 1930s, 40s, et cetera, et cetera. And what you're going to see is that that value system changes as well. Okay. So let's keep moving here. So now we've got 2013 to 2025. And let me roll back over here for one second. And this is what we're calling the generation alpha. Okay. So let's talk about this alpha generation. Fully digital. They're AI native. Global perspective. Inclusivity expected. Now, I want to talk to you about some of this stuff in a minute. So So we have the formative stuff, AIs obviously, automation's important, climate and globalization narratives, and they have been heavily influenced by the pandemic. Now, there is a lot to unpack there, but let's keep moving here for a second. Now, they're AI native, heavy resilience on tech. They trust convenience, but skepticism is still forming. So what I find interesting about the Generation Z and the Alpha is that it's almost like you're seeing that the silent generation, they craved stability and security, and they were clamoring to whatever would give them that sense, which you could imagine the how newscasters and people like that could really become these voices of trust and whatever they would say would be the gospel, to transforming it to where kind of like now we're in the Wizard of Oz, that generation looks behind the curtain and goes, oh, wait, hold on a minute. That's a human too. And so maybe they're influenced by things just like we're influenced by things. And so maybe I can't trust that person. And so then we have AI where it's manipulative in certain ways and it's using certain things as disingenuous. And so now you're having this generation that's starting to see those patterns and they're becoming aware of it. Like, for example, if I'm driving down the road with my son, he quickly identifies AI images. I mean, he's like, no, that's AI generated. He can also quickly identify if something was made by Canva. And he goes, that's just Canva stuff. He marginalizes it because he knows that very little effort was put into it. He knows that somebody just picked a template and dropped something in. And so you can imagine that if you're falling prey to that and you're becoming more disingenuous, but you think you're creating something really eat, you see that quickly that's becoming a problem because you've lost your identity and you're trying to play by the rules that two generations ago were playing by their rules with marketing. And the idea now is to go, you know what? When I eat, sometimes I get food on my shirt. And you just say it. You don't try to hide the fact that you eat like a normal human being and you make mistakes. And And to embrace that authenticness, I think personally is refreshing. And I am glad that I'm seeing the generations after my generation become more aware of it, because what it says is that human beings are something well beyond something that can just simply be manipulated over time. Now, we go into, you can take anything, like you go research Germany before World War II, and then you look at their situations. you know, they had a certain situation that was really primed for a man like Adolf Hitler to take power. And when you look at something like that, you go, okay, now if that happens, what has impacted these generations that aren't as extreme as that? Obviously, that's a huge extreme situation. But then when you look at what all's going on, then you go, okay, well, how do I address that as a business owner and survive during the time. So if you don't move more toward conversational language, you're going to alienate artificial intelligence from using you as a point of reference. And if you don't use authentic language, then the next thing you're going to do is alienate the individual because they know that you're blowing smoke. And right now you're seeing this huge, huge broadcast of people that are claiming that they can do things in marketing they can not do. This is why I'll often tell you, hey, be careful about answering those emails, those cold emails where these people are telling you that they can do, they can't do them. Okay, they can't. The reason they're emailing you cold emails is because it's cheap, it's easy, and they can't market to you in an authentic, realistic way. And so they have to intrude on your day by sending stuff to your email box and putting your name on it when they don't know you to manipulate you into clicking. Now, If we were to take something like that, for example, what they're doing is preying upon certain statistics that we know. So if you take something like that and they go, okay, it's statistically known, like if you look at different data from email marketing tools, it's known that if someone legitimately subscribes and you address them by name and you give them a personalized experience, it's known that that does better. And so what did the bad guys do? Well, of course, course, what they do is they go harvest a bunch of email addresses, harvest the names, dynamically insert your names into these clumsy, dumb emails, and then they send them out, and then they go, okay, that cost us very minimal money to do that. And so if it gets us a certain number of leads, it's worth it. And so by you playing into that game, what you're doing is feeding that machine. But let's think about what else happens. What happens to the next generation when they see that. Oh, it's got my name on it, and I don't know this person. They're trying to manipulate me. And so by you playing the game, then what you're doing is contributing to that, but it's also having the exact opposite effect on the next generation. So you can imagine what that would do to the trust if you hired a company to send cold, unsolicited emails to a group of people, what that does for your reputation. You see, and there's companies that just do that. And so the idea is, where are your boundaries? And then are you preparing for the 35-year-olds that are quickly becoming the next generation? When you look at 13 to 28, it'll be a blink of an eye before Gen Z is your target audience, these digital natives who have a lot of usage. And then there's strong skepticism. How are you going to bridge the gap with that? What are you going to do that's different than what marketing was just a few years ago? Now, if we tie this into the AI, the reason I have been talking so much about artificial intelligence is if you look from a marketing perspective, this is exactly what's going on out there. All these companies have been, a lot of these companies, not all of them, a lot of these companies have built models that are completely unprepared for what's going on with artificial intelligence. I mean, especially if you're in the, like you're renting properties, things like that. I mean, these guys are, a lot of them are completely unprepared and there's a lot of good companies out there that are going to eat their lunch. And the sales pitch of these guys is just absolutely, it's insane that they're even thinking that their sales pitches would still work. But they're unprepared. And so part of what we need to do is be prepared for that AI mechanism, that AI influence that's going on in the world. And part of that is changing exactly how you do things and how you reach people and then do that authentically, you see. So this is also why your marketing plans go up and down. And so I just think it's very, very interesting when you start to break all this down. And so if you're targeting the 35-year-old of today, then remember that 35-year-old today is not the same as a 35-year-old of tomorrow. And you need to do a little bit of homework on this. Okay, so let me button this up with one more thought. Now, the last thought I wanted to kind of make full circle with is this also does not live in a silo by itself. The interesting thing about, oh, and by the way, this is also why you never farm your work out to other countries. You need to work in your native country and hire locals, no matter what the cost is. Because only people that understand your culture and your environment can design within it like legitimately. The other ones will look like they're faking. So just two cents. If you're farming out and thinking you're doing something great by doing that, you're wrong by that. I mean, we are becoming a global community, but it's still the culture and everything is still localized. And if you're neglecting that, you're making some huge mistakes. Anyway. way. A lot of people think they can decide that as an owner of a business without looking at it through a marketing lens, which is also absolutely not true. Okay. So what I wanted to do is talk about some of these other concepts. So one of them is the environment. Okay. Now, when we started this, I talked about that someone who lives in a city versus outside the city may have dramatically different experiences. And so if you could imagine And as a whole, you know, if you were shielded from the Great Depression and World War II, it would also maybe shield you as an individual from following what most people did in the preceding generation. And so when you look at your environment, if you're living in a certain segment of society or a certain area, and there are certain things that are adopted by that group, meaning like, for example, if you take Northeast Ohio, I have some clients over in Ohio right now, and these clients are really salt of the earth, incredible, awesome, kind people. And the way that the internet has influenced them has been marginal compared to how it influences some other people. So if you're marketing to that kind of audience, the way you would take this data we talked about today would have to be also filtered through what that service area looks like. And then you have to make some really big decisions about, okay, can I be authentic within that community? And how do I be authentic to that community? Because if I were to take the practices of an agency in New York that has no clue of what's going on in Northeast Ohio, believe it or not, a good, solid agency, now not a freelancer, not a college kid, not these people, but if you can find a good, solid agency and that area that understands that market, they're going to speak more to your audience than that group in New York. Now, it's not to say that the group in New York is not smart. There are things called focus groups, and there are different things that can help make decisions. But I'm like, if you're swimming in the water, you're going to know the temperature, right? So I really think this is powerful. And I really think that if you digest this and you think about where you're at and what you are and the audience you're trying to target and how they've changed, then I think what it's going to do is change the way that you're approaching business. And I think sooner than later is more important. The more you can get authentic, the more you can adopt conversational language, I think the better you're going to be giving the trend and the shift in the world. Just like no one is using phone books anymore, the same thing is happening with the way people look at their world today too. And so all that needs to be put into its proper context. Okay, so I think I want to wrap up the podcast today with this. I don't really have a lot of, I did pull a lot of data from third-party resources for this information today. I don't think necessarily I'm going to include it because this is just kind of general information. You can do your own homework and also do your own homework. That's one of the most important things you could do is to make Make sure that what I'm telling you is true. And if it's true, then you need to stick with it. And if you see some variance that you need to consider within your area, within what I'm saying, well, consider that too. Put that into the mix. And then the great thing about marketing is, first of all, I always found that telling the truth is so much easier than trying to manipulate somebody. So it's just easier just to be who you are and do what you do, which reminds me of a pretty affluent guy I met a year And I remember him saying at one point, he's like, you know, if we can't be in business, if we can't compete in business with what we are, then we don't need to be in business. And I thought there wasn't a lot that I'll quote from that guy, but that was one of the stories. But the idea is what you want to do is you do want to get to a point to where you're shifting. And if your marketing agency is not addressing these problems or not discussing these issues, then you need to find somebody else. You know, there are so many things that go into this plan. Like I'm doing some research right now. I'll ramble here for just two seconds. And part of what I was researching was a new company starting up in an area and we were looking at their competition and their competition has been around there since like 1979. Okay, now what we also found was those companies in 1979, think about their influences and how they perceive advertising. Skeptical, right? So they're not really embracing digital marketing. So if we were to embrace digital marketing more and then approach that newer generation, you can see the strategic advantage we have because they're setting on what they've already built and they think it's going to continue. That's a great opportunity. But then also we have to earn that business because they're also trusted, you see. Okay, well, that's enough rambling for this week. Thank you so much for joining me with Over the Bull. I do hope this helps you out. Honestly, you have no idea how much I realize that that businesses, they're being so manipulated and promise so many things that just simply aren't true. And I just hope that this reaches you in a way to where you can pierce through the veil of anything that people are selling you or offering you or currently doing for you, and you can change it. And you can change it, and you can be a better, stronger company. And this is one piece of that puzzle that may help Until next week, this is Ken Kerr with Over the Bull, and this podcast is brought to you by Integris Design out of Asheville, North Carolina.

SPEAKER_00: 49:51

Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bull, brought to you by Integris Design, a full-service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.