Understanding the YOLO Generation

Millennials are bold, inquisitive, ambitious and adept. If this demographic had the chequing accounts to match, they’d be a marketer’s dream. Unfortunately, they’re totally broke.

Youth unemployment rates are grim (14.1%), and many bright-eyed young graduates will stay jobless and deep in debt for a long time (the average Canadian university student takes 14 years to pay off their loan).

“There’s a sense that the world is not quite as welcoming a place to them,” says Karl Moore, an associate professor at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management and contributor to Forbes. That sense of alienation from the mainstream economy imposes critical consequences on their consumer habits.

Read full article: Marketing, April 22, 2013