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Inside the Insight.
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Volume 1.
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Millennial Families: Mysterious travel marketing paradigm busters or not all that different from the generations that came before? The answer, it turns out, is a bit of both.
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It wasn’t all that long ago that we were wringing our collective hands over these darned Millennials and the way they were changing travel. Study after study – including our Portrait of American Travelers® work – found Millennials’ planning, booking and sharing habits to be significantly and alarmingly different from those of older leisure travelers.
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With the Millennial cohort just coming into their power-spending years, it looked like this would be the way of things for years to come: us seemingly destined to play a continuous game of catch-up as Millennials continued to confound us.
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But then an interesting, game-changing finding picked up in the 2017–2018 Portrait of American Travelers®: It was no longer those big beard wearers driving the growth of travel; it was young families – young Millennial families – that were the lone bright spot for the coming year in a relatively flat category.
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That was good news for a variety of reasons, with maybe the biggest being that families were something us travel marketers could understand. And maybe this was how we’d finally get our arms around those slippery Millennials: through aging, marriage and kids, they were becoming just like the generations that came before which has led to a bit of feel-good clucking about Millennials really not being all that different after all. Disaster averted. Back-to-business as usual.
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So, after years of aforementioned handwringing, are Millennials really that different as a generation than those that came before them? And, now that they’re getting older, will they begin to resemble the stock family behavior that marketers have come to rely on?
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The answers are yes, and yes and no.
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While young families of today are certainly going to resemble young families of yore, we can’t forget what made Millennials, well, Millennials. Or how that might carry over to how they behave as parents. And how that might influence the way we communicate with them.
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Some thoughts on Millennials as parents that directly impact our work:
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1. They believe world travel makes for well-rounded kids. According to the 2017–2018 Portrait of American Travelers®, while everyone else is vacationing closer to home, Millennials are still high-tailing it around the globe. Surprisingly, Millennial families are vacationing abroad even more than their single or coupled pals. A reason why might have something to do with Millennial parents’ mindset toward child development: Per Forbes, they firmly believe that a good way to raise a well-rounded child is through travel, adventure and the acceptance of other cultures. And that’s a nice little higher-end benefit hot button right there.
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2. They’re more democratic as a family unit. Millennials as parents are decidedly more inclusive than the generations that came before them. First, they aren’t as hierarchical, with 80 percent agreeing that their child is “one of their best friends,” according to a recent Google IPSOS Connect study. And two-thirds say they involve their children in all household decisions, supporting our notion that kids call the shots in family vacation planning. Second, Millennial parents operate as a team, with dads taking a more active role in parenting and household duties. Therefore, messaging to Millennial families should reflect this important audience shift that challenges the traditional “speak directly to Mom” school of communication. The angle changes some when you’re not selling a vacation grounded only in what Mom really wants.
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3. They won’t give up who they are. Unlike prior generations, Millennials are determined to hold onto their passions as they get older and become parents. So, Millennials are big on actively incorporating their kids into their interests and hobbies, according to Google IPSOS. That means if they dig surfing remote breaks in emerging countries or beer tasting in cool urban haunts, Junior is coming with. And that substantively changes the way a young family vacation could look within our work (while challenging, to some degree, the notion that kids always call the shots). For Millennial parents, kids can be welcome, but often more on the grown-ups’ terms.
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4. They’re cutting to the chase to get the life they want to live now. Waiting until a bit later in life to marry and have kids means there’s going to be pent-up demand for certain things. So, Millennial families aren’t just patiently waiting to enjoy the life their parents had; they’re jumping a few rungs at a time up the ladder to get it now. For instance, last year Zillow found that many first-time Millennial home buyers were skipping the traditional starter home and purchasing larger homes previously considered the norm for “move up” buyers. Sure, part of that’s the need for more space, but part of it is the desire to make up for lost time. And that impatience for the better life is a perfect way in when hawking luxury family vacations.
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5. Being parents makes them incredibly happy. So maybe this whole “married with children” thing – even while wreaking a new kind of havoc in their lives – is all it’s cracked up to be. And settling down to watch your kids grow up brings a profound contentment and feeling that they’ve never before experienced. It certainly creates a happier group. According to the 2017–2018 Portrait of American Travelers®, Millennial families are more optimistic than their single and coupled Millennial friends about their own futures, their careers and even America (that’s some serious contentment!).
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Maybe that’s why their parents – and parents’ parents – did it, too. It’s not just that there are realities inherent in parenting you can’t escape, but that there are so many wonderful things about parenting you wouldn’t want to. And in that way, those that have chosen the family route are very much the same regardless of generation. That is why Millennials’ behavior as parents is something we think we better recognize (finally!).
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So, when it comes to marketing to these now-valuable Millennial families, the right play, as with many things, is somewhere in the middle. Understanding and speaking directly to those things that make Millennials inherently different as a generation while leveraging the universal realities this particular life stage brings about.
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In closing, a few thoughts on how to go from insight to activation:
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Serve it up differently. We’ve seen more than our fair share of the “family of four running on white-sand beaches, wearing all white” ads and plenty of those shots of young families doing the kinds of things you’d expect young families to be doing. However, Millennial families’ intrepid approach to travel – and the base reasons they travel – gives us license to portray young families on vacation as we’ve never seen them before, doing things and in places we’ve not seen them before. So, go there.
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Lower your threshold. Your household income threshold, that is. Remember there’s a difference between affluent travelers and luxury travelers. And though Millennial families might not yet be pulling down major dough, they are seeking the good life right now while planning on spending significantly more money on travel than their single and coupled pals. But don’t make it Garden & Gun snobby elitist luxury. Instead, much more inclusive and comfy.
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Feel the (good) vibrations. They’re a happy lot, so serve up vacation as a supercharged celebration of their daily bliss. That’s versus the “antidote to a hectic, harried life” approach we see way too often.
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