Meeting consumers where they are

By Kevin Manne

From the 1960s through the 1980s, brands could easily market to a wide swath of the baby boomer generation by advertising during shared, mass-culture moments like these on network TV, radio and in print.  

But with the development of cable TV, followed by the internet, streaming and social media, audiences have increasingly fragmented into smaller groups, making it trickier for businesses to market widely.

And although technology has introduced new challenges for marketers, it also has provided new opportunities, such as the ability to customize messaging and more directly target the consumers who are most likely to make a purchase across all generations — from the boomers to Generation Alpha.

Josh Seff, BS ’07, has nearly 20 years of experience in marketing, including tenures at AOL, Rakuten and the NBA. He currently serves as senior product marketing manager at Amazon, where he develops strategic product offerings and marketing initiatives for the Professional Seller Support service, ensuring both business growth and seller success.

“I’ve seen the industry shift from the traditional approach of right person, right message, right place and time, which was a bit more of a spray-and-pray technique,” he says. “Now, with the introduction of targeting technology we have more powerful tools, but things are also a bit more complicated. So, for me as a marketer, I try to think of the places where the different generations exist and meet them where they are.”

In his time at Reddit, Seff focused on helping businesses engage with the platform’s unique communities and navigate direct feedback from customers, which he says can be a bit scary for brands.

So, when he was tapped to work with Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco media company to promote a Comic-Con event on Reddit, his team pitched the idea of doing a Photoshot contest in lieu of a typical promotion plan that would simply deliver links to information.

“We took this platform that already existed on Reddit and extended it to connect authentically to the Team Coco initiative in a way that people were familiar with,” he said. “We also worked to control the interaction by creating a fun experience that provided a positive environment where people could submit content, comment and have conversations around the brand.”

While not everyone from a particular generation is the same, there are media consumption trends and content preferences among baby boomers, Generation X, millennials (also known as Generation Y), Generation Z and the latest, Generation Alpha, that marketers can use to appeal to their target audience, according to Charles Lindsey, associate professor of marketing.

“Each generation brings its own values, habits and expectations to the marketplace, and smart marketers recognize that what resonates with a baby boomer won’t necessarily move a Gen Zer,” says Lindsey. “Today’s opportunities lie in understanding those differences, from Gen Z’s passion for purpose and pride in finding a great deal to millennials’ demand for experiences, and preparing now for the rise of Gen Alpha and the shift toward social commerce that will redefine how we shop, give and engage.”

Throughout his career in the music industry, Franz de los Reyes, BS ’07, has held marketing roles at Def Jam Recordings, Epic Records and Warner Records, and has been part of the industry’s generational marketing shift.

From early social platforms like MySpace through Instagram and TikTok, de los Reyes says each move has required a new understanding of how to best engage.

“There was a point where I was tweeting for artists, so I had to learn to engage on that platform, and then came apps like Instagram, Tumblr and Snapchat,” he says. “You have to be on the cusp of these emerging technologies and understand how they make sense for the artist.”

One of the biggest artists on de los Reyes’ current roster as head of marketing for SALXCO/Live Nation Entertainment is The Weeknd, the performer who headlined the Super Bowl LV halftime show in 2021 and has won four Grammys, along with multiple Billboard Music Awards, Juno Awards, American Music Awards and more.

De los Reyes has played a key leadership role in marketing The Weeknd’s recent projects, such as the album and film rollout of Hurry Up Tomorrow. He also helped design and execute the performer’s The End is Near campaign, which integrated both traditional and new media strategies to connect with newer and longstanding fans of the artist’s 10-plus year career.

The goal of the campaign was to build excitement for the album’s launch, which marked the culmination of a trilogy of albums (After Hours, Dawn FM and Hurry Up Tomorrow), as well as the closing chapter of The Weeknd moniker as he enters a new era.

“We wanted to honor The Weeknd’s legacy while reaching new audiences,” de los Reyes said. “So we brought the story to life through a series of traditional billboards in cities across the U.S. and paired that with a fully immersive world in the Roblox online game to bridge generations through both physical presence and digital engagement.”

Lands’ End is best known for its retail business, where the company’s primary demographic is adults ages 45 and up, particularly women who are 50-plus and value the brand’s comfort, durability, style and practicality.

Lands’ End Outfitters is the company’s business-to-business arm, which focuses on outfitting employees and customizing branded apparel for everything from a local flower shop to American Airlines or Chase Bank. The business serves a broad professional audience — from recent college graduates purchasing their first set of branded workwear to senior executives with decades of experience tasked with selecting uniform providers or sourcing high-quality branded gifts for enterprise-wide programs.

Lands’ End is best known for its retail business, where the company’s primary demographic is adults ages 45 and up, particularly women who are 50-plus and value the brand’s comfort, durability, style and practicality.

Lands’ End Outfitters is the company’s business-to-business arm, which focuses on outfitting employees and customizing branded apparel for everything from a local flower shop to American Airlines or Chase Bank. The business serves a broad professional audience — from recent college graduates purchasing their first set of branded workwear to senior executives with decades of experience tasked with selecting uniform providers or sourcing high-quality branded gifts for enterprise-wide programs.

As the company’s senior marketing manager, Nicole (Jeziorowski) Lazarus, BS ’11, sees demographic preferences rapidly changing.

“As many companies shift from traditional uniforms to more relaxed dress code policies, we’re evolving our designs to reflect that change,” she says. “Our focus remains on helping employees feel confident and comfortable in what they wear — because when they feel their best, they perform at their best.”

To meet these changes in demand, Lazarus echoes the need to focus on where the generations consume their media and how to get their attention, and says influencer marketing is the No. 1 form of relatability for a younger generation.

“Catalogs are a tried-and-true medium, and Lands’ End is probably mostly known for its catalogs, but we have begun to question whether anyone is reading catalogs anymore,” she says. “We’ve been doing a lot of research on this, and catalogs are a tactic we still use, but there is just so much media literacy in the younger generation that they’re not as easily influenced by traditional marketing tactics.”

According to Michael Krupski, clinical assistant professor of strategy, the line between content and commerce has blurred. Influencer marketing now plays a major role in how brands reach consumers, with trust being transferred from the brand to a third-party content creator.

And he says that while influencer marketing isn’t new, today’s tools make detailed targeting and two-way engagement possible at scale.

“Through the evolution of technology, we’ve changed how we talk to consumers,” says Krupski. “And companies don’t just talk to consumers now. Now consumers can talk back, and that really has changed the landscape to make marketing much more of a conversation than just a company standing up and saying, ‘Hey, here are my products. You should buy them, and here’s why.’”

Krupski cautions that while these new techniques provide powerful marketing opportunities, they also create potentially brand-damaging challenges as well — like when DiGiorno Pizza jumped on a trending Twitter hashtag, #WhyIStayed, without checking its context.

The brand unknowingly tweeted “#WhyIStayed You had pizza.” amid stories from domestic abuse survivors, which immediately backfired and became a textbook example of what happens when social teams react too quickly without checking the context.

“To do real-time marketing right, you implicitly have to empower your social media team to make decisions themselves, because time-to-reaction is one of the key drivers of success,” he says. “The DiGiorno example shows what happens when brands chase relevance without understanding the situation. One tone-deaf tweet can cause lasting damage.”

While mass culture moments like the M-A-S-H finale aren’t as common today as they were in the ’80s, they aren’t all gone. Multiple Super Bowls have surpassed the sitcom’s mark since Super Bowl XLIV hit an average of more than 106 million viewers in 2010. And advertising rates have skyrocketed along with viewership — up to about $8 million for a 30-second spot in the 2025 showdown where the Chiefs lost to the Eagles by a score of 40-22.

But opportunities like that are both cost-prohibitive and increasingly few and far between. As marketers look to the future, Professor Lindsey says the industry should prepare for social commerce and the rise of Generation Alpha.

“Just as e-commerce disrupted traditional retail, social commerce is poised to disrupt e-commerce with 10-20% of online spending projected to move onto social media platforms,” says Lindsey. “The brands that win will be the ones that invest in social commerce now, learn the space and position themselves to meet the next generation of consumers where they live, shop and connect online.”

According to Professor Krupski, no matter who a brand is trying to reach, and no matter what new or traditional platform is being used, it all comes down to storytelling.

“It’s all about creating that affinity with consumers,” says Krupski. “The methods we use to tell that story have vastly changed, but whether you’re talking to somebody who is 70 or 17, you need to be telling a story to pull people into your brand.”

How marketing has evolved to reach different cohorts of consumers