Marketing Chart: How age affects customer satisfaction with marketing

We asked 1,200 consumers, sampled to reflect a close match to the U.S. population's demographics, to tell us about a company they were satisfied with. We then asked them a range of questions, including …

Thinking about the marketing of [company name], which of the following is true of your experience? Select all that apply.

(The chart will open in a new window, click and zoom to read the data.)

To see 34 more charts from the study, download the free report.

Consistent good experiences are the top way marketing helps create satisfied customers

The biggest way marketing can help create satisfied customers is by creating consistent good experiences, according to the data. “I consistently have good experiences with it” was the top response by satisfied customers when asked about that company’s marketing.

While it was the top response for all age groups, older generations were more likely to select it. Three-fourths of the Silent Generation (born between 1925 and 1945) chose this option, while just half (49%) of millennials (born between 1980 and 1995) chose the option.

As you can see when you look at the chart, this was a pretty consistent pattern — up to a point. As age moved from older to younger, there was a downward slope of how often respondents chose an option, even though the order of topics for all the generations was roughly the same.

The inflection point comes when the topics switched to a more customer-first marketing focus. For the following selections, the responses flipped and the younger generations were more likely to select them than the older generations, with millennials leading the way:

• Its marketing is engaging and interesting to me
• It knows what I like and don’t like
• It puts my needs and wants above its own business goals

Is customer-first marketing an emerging trend or always more likely to be favored by younger generations?

Any time you see a pattern like this in the data, there could be one of two explanations.

It could simply be that younger people are more interested in customer-first marketing. And as millennials age, they too will focus on other elements of marketing (consistency) over customer-first marketing (a company putting customers’ needs and wants above its own business goals).

Marketing has shifted from authoritative source to ironic entertainment to the age of transparency

Or could this data signal a shift in consumers’ views toward marketing in general? Over the past few decades, marketing has shifted from authoritative source to ironic entertainment to the age of transparency. Younger consumers may simply have grown up in the age of transparency and come to naturally expect transparent marketing and a customer-first business approach.

Speak to customers in their language

As you can see, it’s important to speak to different generations in a language that will appeal to them.

For example, older generations might respond better to a consistency message, while younger generations might find a customer-first message more appealing. (Please note, this is a very broad brushstroke approach. However, if you don’t have the data or technology to get more personal, segmenting by generations is at least a start).

To give you an idea of how to speak in the language of your customer segments, I turned to a source that has to do this every day — a translation service — to see what we can learn for our own marketing messages.

At first, translation might seem extreme; their different segments literally speak different languages. But if you ever really thought about it while you were lampin’ (or insert your preferred slang term here), you can see that 18-year-olds and 80-year-olds practically speak a different language from each other, as do other customer subsets.

Transcreation

“In order to truly craft their messaging, many of our clients require ‘transcreation’ to fully reinvent their message for each target audience,” Nick Mango, Account Manager, Eriksen Translations, told me.

“Translation involves rendering a message into another language so that it sounds as if it was written by a native speaker of that language. Transcreation, also known as creative translation, is about adapting ideas and concepts. It takes into consideration the cultural differences and the effectiveness of the content on the target culture, to reinvent the message so that it truly speaks to each audience in their own language,” he said.

“This approach puts the client first. The clients’ needs, their culture and their worldview are key to crafting a message that will resonate,” Mango said.

Understanding your customers’ worldview

Is effective messaging to customer segments really so different?

It’s important to always start with their worldview — not what you want to sell them, what action you want them to take or the channels you would like them to get your message in and communicate through.

Then consider, based on their worldview, how they might perceive your marketing and how different techniques will sit with them — either increasing or decreasing their likelihood to act, as well as how that perception will impact their overall satisfaction with your company.

Related resources

Marketing Chart: Does customer-centric marketing fall short of satisfying the customer?

Transparent Marketing: How to earn the trust of a skeptical consumer

The Importance Of Building Trust: What 2,400 consumers say about trust in the conversion process

Get free reports, how-to guides and tools to help you improve your marketing