Sell to a Gen X? Be Straightforward and Show Some Love
Photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash You want Gen X customers or clients? Take the time to understand them. To reach them, adopt two strategies: authenticity and acknowledgment. If you betray a Gen X – or fail to value Gen X patronage – a Gen Xer will turn his or her back on you, badmouth you, or pretend you don’t exist. After a Gen X experiences even the suspicion you are playing games or the hint that you don’t really care or understand, rekindling a relationship is impossible. They will, in plaid flannel and torn jeans, walk away with both middle fingers held high. Because of parental and societal treatment, Gen X, those born between 1965 and 1980, trust no one and feel forever negated. For this article, for example, I searched for images to face pictures of knee surgeries, Millennials, and Boomers. Lots of grey-haired grandparents. Models in skinny jeans. A Model T Ford. No. Wow. Members bond over these shared experiences. Authentic marketing is one key to reaching Gen Xers. You must earn trust – and continue to be honest in your product, service, offers, and customer care, to keep that trust. Add to your authentic communication indices of personalization. Recognize each Gen X customer or client as an individual – be interested in them, recognize their loyalty, notice their preferences – and you will make and continue to make the sale. Experts recognize Gen X children were abandoned (no one home, no one cared, left to their own devices) or rejected (never good enough, not right, not special, not worth it). And that treatment continues as Gen X is the ignored or forgotten generation, rejected, and abandoned as the media agenda focuses on Boomers and Millennials. Perhaps this treatment results from Gen X having less members than other generations. Gen X numbers only about 65 million people. Liberal abortion policies and birth control methods, shifting to better healthcare, resulted in Gen X having fewer members than previous – and post – generations. Experts also mark Gen X along a shorter, 16 year timeframe while most generations span 20 years. Whatever the reason, Gen Xers are not happy about it. The latchkey generation, whose Boomer and Lost Gen parents did not spare the rod or spoil the child, Gen Xers suffered unreported child abuse in a society that believed parents had the right to discipline in any way they wanted. Discipline ranged from spankings to worse – and included denial of food, imprisonment, denial of healthcare, or eviction. Over the past ten years as a personal coach, 75% of my 53 Gen X clients have disclosed experiencing physical or sexual abuse. (Yes, those seeking coaching may be more likely to be seeking help – but the percentage is still disconcerting.) At school, not only would teachers and administrators ignore or avoid issues of parental abuse and neglect, but also would characterize Gen X students along Breakfast Club lines. As character Brian Johnson says: “You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms with the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.” That is the Gen X experience. They have been generalizations and characterizations as diametric opposites: dumb/smart, pretty/ugly, athletic/spaz. Worse, pedagogists of the time had only started to identify learning disabilities and autistic characteristics. No matter the intelligence, they labeled autistic Gen Xers troublemakers and discipline problems. They forced those with dyslexia into the “special” class. And no one – no one – was interested in assessing a Gen X child for mental illness. Gen X was the first to live with high divorce rates and single-parent households – and the first modern generation where both parents had to work to support a household. Alone, Gen X drowned in danger. Boomer generation parents held to the self-reliance and privacy precepts – even if you are suffering abuse. Shut up (go to your room, this conversation is for adults, don’t ask questions) and deal (take care of your siblings, you forgot your homework paper too bad, we don’t have the money for your hobbies) was the message for Gen Xers. Sex was something our free-love, hippy parents enjoyed, but was to be feared during the AIDS epidemic. Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States kept Gen Xers wondering when the bomb was coming. Gen Xers remember the gas station lines during the energy crisis – and the parental conversations when daddy was laid off, again (Gen Xers have lived through three recessions: the Dot-com bubble, the financial crisis, and the pandemic.) Financially conservative (fearful) parents and grandparents who had survived the Great Depression, along with the threat of zombies, Skynet, or alien invasion, kept Gen Xers constantly on edge. High ACE scores (adverse childhood experience measurements) resulted in Gen X having worse health than prior generations. With higher instances of alcohol and drug abuse, they also suffer more anxiety and depression. Even with their focus on and opportunities for exercise, better nutrition, and even bio hacking, Gen Xers suffer with obesity, chronic inflammation, and elevated blood pressure and cholesterol (what experts call physiological dysregulation). Gen X also is the first generation in history to not do better economically than their parents. Many Gen X have filed bankruptcy, lost their homes – and almost 40% have more debt than savings! We cringe at every commercial on cable and paid television: I subscribed to avoid commercials! Why am I still paying? College costs skyrocketed for Gen Xers. Where mom and dad paid out of pocket for higher education, Gen X was burdened with mortgage-sized college loans. Speaking of mortgages: Boomers purchased a first home for what Gen X paid for their first clunker cars. Many Gen Xers entered the job market during or after the recession – forcing Gen X
Justified Karens
We cannot and should not shame a category of people. We should shame behavior. The Karen craze is an attempt to silence strong women.
Intelligencism: Bias Against Smart People
So, when you fail to label and celebrate the intelligent, when you mock and degrade us, you commit intelligentism and sentence humanity to extinction.
Do You Know More than a Fifth Grader? No One Cares.
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Introverts May or May Not be Shy
Introverts may or may not be shy. But it’s still none of your business. Private observers of life and living, understand the world of introverts.
Turn Your World Upside Down
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A Tiger on My Truck
Considering the misguided wisdom of wild animal parks. Neighborhoods are inappropriate. And should wild animals be penned at all?
Force Me to Award You an A and to Retire
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Smell the Old People
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Don’t Panic Post Everywhere: The Why of Social Media Management
Photo by Jas Min on Unsplash For so many of my clients, primarily Gen X entrepreneurs, posting on social media is a source of panic. They are aware they should be, have to, need to, to keep up with their competitors. But doing so is daunting, time consuming, and confusing. Let me clear up some misconceptions, give you assurances, and teach you a few key points so you can handle your social media marketing with confidence! Social Media is One Channel Communication requires the sending of a message across a channel. For any company, marketing channels are many and varied. The main categories are three: voice (face-to-face, telephone), print (periodicals, circulars, billboards, posters and fliers, brochures, business cards), and digital (website, email, SMS/text, internet ads and posts). Each channel has its own challenges – and digital can be the most daunting! For many entrepreneurs who grew up in a non-digital environment, the concept of posting on social media induces anxiety. First, they’re not sure what message to send. Second, they aren’t tech savvy. And third, they don’t have time to keep up with it. So, they ask why do they need to use it at all. Why Social Media? Understand that our business culture has shifted to a relationship model. Consumers no longer want to be talked at: They eschew print ads, radio ads – Crazy Eddie screaming at them! They want to talk to the business. They want to feel part of a team. Our ever identity-focused culture demands businesses acknowledge the consumer as a unique person. Social media facilitates that connection. You post an ad for your new widget. Or you post a sale notice. Great! But it should not stop there. You must rethink your approach to marketing. This is not 1975. You are thinking you can post it and the customers will burst down the doors, credit cards ready! Nope. Social media posting is not a spray and pray activity. You can’t randomly share posts you like and think that’s enough to establish credibility and qualify as a social media goddess. No. Why bother at all? When you post that ad to social media, you must invite likes, follows, shares, and feedback. If you are posting without a plan, you are truly wasting your time. And, contemporaneously, communicating to the market that you don’t know what you are doing, do not understand modern culture, and don’t care about them. Without getting too professorish, communication is not one way. In fact, communication theorists once thought of communication as a one-way exchange, akin to a photograph. But that’s not reality. Communication is more like a movie or video: Person One sends a message across a channel to Person Two. Person Two then responds across the channel with feedback to Person One. And so it goes. Every effort you make on social media should facilitate that transaction. The Challenge “It’s too much,” my client, who I will call Larry, told me recently. “I’m supposed to create this ad or video or blog or whatever, figure out how to get it up there, track how well it does, answer everyone who comments or asks a question – and I’m supposed to do this daily? I’m running my business. I don’t have time. TikTok videos. Creating a YouTube page and videos? What the hell are Reels, anyway? And Facebook and Pinterest. I just about mastered posting an article a year on LinkedIn – and then my friend said I should be Tweeting daily. Are you serious? But I tried and was on the computer all day instead of selling my widgets. Who does that help? Sure, I got twenty likes and lost three days of sales. The whole thing is stupid and a waste of time.” Larry is not alone. To those of us who grew up with radio ads and newspapers, with salespeople at our door selling shoes or vacuums, the social media thing is too foreign. The mastery is evasive – and with time so precious, most entrepreneurs hire some social media guru to handle all of it only to find the dude or chick disappears with the entrepreneur’s $3,000! One of my friends hired a web developer to create the website and set up and manage social media. After fourteen months, her business still does not have the website. She’s at her wit’s end: “I’m relying on our Google and Yelp listings. The website lady keeps telling me she’s almost done. I just don’t have time for this!” As an entrepreneur, you must pick your battles and spread your dollars for maximum return. You may need an expert to create your website. But your social media? You can set that up and run it in a short time with an exacting effort. Here are your steps! Where? What Social Accounts You Need As a sophisticated business owner, you wrote your business plan and your marketing plan. So, you’ve done your research and described your customer or client persona. The persona is a description of your ideal customer or client. It includes demographic and personality data. Who is this person? Age, gender, marital and family status, economic status, education level, and so on. You know what this person values. Do they care about religion? Their country? Family and friends? You know where they donate their time and to whom they make political contributions. What music and movies they like? What they wear. Where they vacation. You know their temperament and how they satisfy their needs and wants. You get the idea. You should also discover what social media your ideal client prefers. Are they on YouTube watching home improvement videos? Do they post vacation images on Instagram? Do they use Facebook daily? Weekly? Never? Much of this depends, generally, into which generation your ideal client or customer falls. Socio-economic status and education level is also important. Do some research and figure out where they are. Let’s take a Gen X baseball fan. You will find him on the
Tech is Dooming Small Business: Saving Mom and Pop
Image courtesy of Luca Bravo on Unsplash Have problems with your website? Is coding a challenge? Confused about how to post effectively to social media? Yeah, me too. As a premature participant in the Big Quit, in 2019, I embraced the risk and launched my photography business. What was a hobby became enticing: people were hiring me for sessions and I felt energized. I believed I could live the life of a creative denied to me in my youth by the “artists starve” mantra. Yeah. Notice the date I launched. I booked my first high-paying photography session for March 2020. Do I need to relive the moment that lucrative contract died from Covid? Portraiture, head shots, food and restaurant clients disappeared. You were there. You remember. I kept a few product and art clients who would mail me the pieces – which I would wipe down before and after. But my entrepreneurial hopes were KN95 masked and dashed. To survive, I revived my copyrighting business. Although I’d like nothing more than to become George R. R. Martin (minus the girth and hat), I had long-supported my writing hobby with copyrighting side gigs. A business plan here. An employee manual or ghost-written article there. I passed the word around my network and picked up a few nibbles. But the world is not the one of the early 90s. I submitted an article to a new client, and he asked: “Did you incorporate our keywords?” Keywords? You bet your backlink I learned about keywords. I had to learn SEO. I came to incorporate relationship branding and marketing. Every social media platform was a new battle. What the hell is an API Key? And then, when I wrote webpage content for an enthusiastic and satisfied client, she asked me to create her website. (That’s what I get for doing a good job.) Sure, I had fumbled around and Wixed my way through my site. After years of avoidance, I had to familiarize myself with various website platforms and venture into coding. I had dodged the tech quagmire for so long. When I needed one damn credit to earn my degree, I took a summer-term HTML class at Emerson. The professor, a talented code expert, leaned over my work and commented: “You’re really good at this! Have you considered designing websites?” I groaned. “I start law school next August. My plan is to hire someone like you to handle all this crap.” That moment replays in my mind every damn time I am battling a Z-Index. Big damn mouth on me. But I realized most professionals and entrepreneurs think that same thing: that their budget will cover hiring for these tasks. Or that they will have the time and energy to handle these tasks. Who could have predicted that a copyrighter, a master of persuasion and killer of the comma splice, would need to become tech-savvy? Madness. How many skills do I need to master to keep funding my 401k? Seriously. When I launched my first website for my law office, I hired someone. My interest level to create a website – even my own – was zero. Yet, when the contractor presented her finished product, the branding was so far off from my luxury style, I paid her and never used the site. I mean, really – lime green and yellow? With clip art characters? I’m pretty convinced she was a devotee of Timothy Leary. I’m a Dennis Leary girl. Without the time or inclination, I hired website guru number two. She correctly branded the site, ensured it loaded it quickly, embedded the important links, and made it look great. But every sentence contained a misspelled word and grammatical errors. (After I provided the copy, she rewrote it. Because, yeah… she thought it sounded hip. Thank you, Miley Cyrus. Please don’t write a legal brief or business plan anytime soon.) As a small business owner, you have limited time. A talented copyrighter is not enough. You need more than a tech savvy web developer and a marketing specialist. You need a Jill-of-all-trades who can write, capture your brand identity, structure your site, embed links, and respect analytics…. I’ve been trying to be Jill for three years. And I struggle. My small-business owners experience that same struggle when they hire five people to get one webpage published. And hire another three to post to social media. It’s a wallet blood-bath and most small business owners default to “I’ll do what I can when I can.” You not only have to earn your street MBA but also have to graduate with journalism, programing, social media management, and psychology degrees. It’s unrealistic. A dear friend and her husband own a small business. They hired a Millennial web developer two years ago. They still don’t have a website (which is promised in excuse-email after excuse email) and they rely on Yelp reviews and social media to promote their business. It’s not a good look. But what can they do? The budget doesn’t permit hiring a team of people. Some digging (also known as research) provided me with insight into the state of small business marketing efforts: Corporations who boast market success can afford teams to accomplish all that needs to be accomplished in our tech-dependent world. Where does that leave mom-and-pop entrepreneurs? The local mechanic relies on word-of-mouth and his kid occasionally helping him post to Instagram while the big-box mechanic, with the flashy website, runs him out of business? Seems like a danger to competition. Worse, whether we want to avoid discussing it, those who can code and who grew up in the tech-world are Quiet Quitting. Or can’t form a coherent sentence. (Honestly, I fired a Gen Z employee when I found her taking a selfie while at her desk. She can quiet quit on someone else’s dime.) And if you hire an older marketing guru, they deem current initiatives fluff: What’s a backlink? You don’t need QR codes or a bit.ly. Let’s run
Oh, Holy Night
The trees speak of this night. This holy night.