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YSO DIFFERENT
Millennials have embraced the You Only Live Once mantra. Here's why your brand needs to keep up
illennials 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.
Moore says his Master's-level students, many of whom still live with roommates or their parents, are very well traveled compared to previous cohorts, and more culturally curious. "It's harder to find a job, so they say "Let's turn a lemon into lemonade and go see the world at least.' If they come back and it's a better job market, at least they...