Consumers’ behaviour and tastes are influenced by specific historical times and values dominated during their childhood and adult years. This can be explained by the fact that humans learn most efficiently through vision and audition. Although the information is acquired from the other senses as well, touch, taste, smell, the human is best equipped to handle information from seeing and hearing, and except in early infancy, most learning occurs through these senses. My generational cohort shares unique values and traditions, world views and vision of reality typical for the late 1980s-1990s.
Values and life tastes of my cohort influence purchasing decisions and buying patterns. My generational cohort likes fast food and pizza restaurants. In the past twenty years, pizza seems to have taken many countries by storm and hundreds of thousands of pizza parlours, palaces, and plazas have opened so that they are now as common as hamburger and chicken stands, those monuments to the iron constitution and lack of discrimination of the stomach. Similar trends are typical for many European generations. The consequence of all this is that the Europeans are led to believe that they stand alone and that their whole destiny is in their own hands. This is part of the American Dream.
My generational cohort can be described as friendly, generous, and good-natured, as well as rich, uncultivated, and the like, as a stoic, sceptic and cynic. The generation I belonged to is a cynic to the extent that he believes that happiness or right and intelligent living lies in conduct that is independent of events and factors external to himself. He repudiates society in the name of self (as if there were only one choice between two diametrical opposites) and withdraws from life. The individual from my generation is a sceptic to the extent that he believes one cannot attain “true knowledge”; thus, his morality is individualistic, and his religion is fragmented into two hundred (at least) Protestant sects and no official church. Similar ideas are typical for many Americans and Europeans. Since the good doubts, he is slow to act — except, that is, on the personal level. Thus, the European as “sceptic” is very conservative. Since he can’t be sure how bad his society is and how good any new society might be, he tends to let habit be his guide and modifies his institutions at a frighteningly slow rate.
My generation can be described as stoic to the extent that he believes that the virtuous man finds happiness in himself, separates politics from morals and, despairing of social reform, turns inward. He learns to be relatively indifferent about suffering or pain and to submit himself to “the law of nature.” A good society, for the stoic, is a society of moral people. He has little concern for politics and government and social morality as opposed to individual morality. But letting nature take its course is decidedly conservative. Similar values are typical for many young people in other countries, except Muslim states. There are, of course, strong elements of liberalism and progressivism, and we may be breaking through the wall of conservatism created by our cynicism, scepticism and stoicism. There are outposts of progress, so to speak, where people are experimenting with new lifestyles and new forms of social organization, and even in society at large, there are lots of gaps and fissures in the social structure where people can live more or less as they want to.
My generation is preoccupied with the automobile. We are a cohort of so-called individualists, and the automobile is the ultimate means of individual mobility — though it is also the most costly. The freedom and sense of power we feel when driving are particularly important to young people, who find the automobile and motorized speed both a means of escape from social restrictions and an exhilarating, thrilling experience in its own right. But the matter of mobility is a complicated one, for not only does it involve getting from place to place, but also — especially in America — it involves social mobility. In my country, young people lack leadership values and political traditions dominated in European countries and in America. For instance, in the USA, every person is taught that he can be President of the United States, but it seems necessary to be a millionaire to try (at least in recent years). Since we measure achievement in economic terms, this means those at the bottom must suffer from a grievous sense of inadequacy. In order to assuage these feelings, the ordinary man goes into debt, and a gigantic economic institution has developed to allow him to do so — instalment buying. The ordinary man is heavily in debt, which puts terrific emotional strains on him. Following Schewe “Cohort segmentation, by reflecting the values developed during late adolescence/early adulthood and held by a targeted cohort largely unchanged clearly works. At the same time, success is not sufficient Future research is needed to understand further the depth and scope one’s formative years have on tastes, preferences, values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours.”
In sum, these values create a demand for high-quality products and services, including luxury cars and good education, good food and unique entertainment. There is a big question about how possible it is to rise in contemporary America — that is, in a significant manner. And some have suggested that, in effect, mobility is now blocked. In the old days, it was possible for office assistants to become corporation presidents; nowadays, one needs a graduate degree from an important business school (Harvard, Wharton School of Finance, etc.) to start off decently in the corporation hierarchies, and a good start is most of the battle.