I’m deploying all my Google Fu to try and find the original study here, but MTV Networks apparently hides their studies in a special, special box only accessible if you’re a fair person, which I am not. Anyway, in this piece by Patrick Evans at Media Post on the social media accessibility of Gen Y, there’s an interesting slice:
According to a recent MTV Networks study, 70% of Gen Y consumers said they’d figure out how to make things fair if they feel a company is being unfair with them. The network found that the group as a whole demands fairness, transparency and clear, consistent rules from brands. This often means brands get bombarded with negative Facebook posts or tweets when it increases shipping charges or makes a decision a majority of its consumers doesn’t like.
Can’t figure out how to do a Google search, but IT’S LATTER-DAY ROBIN HOOD TIME B when Netflix changes their pricing model. I wish I could find the study, actually, because I’d like to investigate the phrasing. This passage, when you give a good hard look, offers a terrifying possibility: “makes a decision a majority of its consumers doesn’t like.” Is that what unfairness is now? When a change is made that people don’t like?
And let’s double-down. Here is your intro post for Gen Y, this sentence: “The network found that the group as a whole demands fairness, transparency and clear, consistent rules from brands”? Fairness, transparency, and rules! I know I love to reference this Don Peck Atlantic piece, but the echoes are there:
Ron Alsop, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace, says a combination of entitlement and highly structured childhood has resulted in a lack of independence and entrepreneurialism in many 20-somethings. They’re used to checklists, he says, and “don’t excel at leadership or independent problem solving.” Alsop interviewed dozens of employers for his book, and concluded that unlike previous generations, Millennials, as a group, “need almost constant direction” in the workplace. “Many flounder without precise guidelines but thrive in structured situations that provide clearly defined rules.”
BUT THESE ARE THE RULES. It’s not that these are bad things, of course. Transparency, fairness, and clear expectations are good qualities in a business. But if one of the three tenets is built on something so ephemeral as mass good feelings, the structural integrity of the whole thing seems questionable.