Modern Marketing for Emerging Adults
The NY Times recently published an article about a psychology professor’s attempt to gain professional consensus around a new life stage called “emerging adults.” According to this professor, Jeffrey Arnett, “emerging adults” those who are between the age of 18 and the late 20s; a period in life when people are too old to be considered adolescents, but too young to be considered adults. Or as Jeff Buckley once elegantly lamented, “Too young to hold on and too old just to break free and run.” The psychological profile of emerging adults is marked by “identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and a rather poetic characteristic [Arnett] calls ‘a sense of possibilities.’” Should this life stage be fully adopted by the professional and academic community, we may see policy changes in healthcare, education and social services sometime in our future, but there are real implications for marketers now.
Though it has been out for more than a month, an incidental comment about Verizon’s Droid campaign made today by our Director of Media Integration triggered a torrent of comments from our designers. The debate: is the Droid campaign cool? Well targeted? Creepy? Here's what we think.