Six Cultural Trends Being Driven By Technology

The following is an excerpt from an article in the Huffington Post about social innovation break throughs. Marketing Professor Carol Phillips contributes to the list of breakthroughs by discussing Millennial overkill. To read the entire article visit: Six Cultural Trends Being Driven By Technology.

Trends come and go. But every now and then a major wave arises that ripples across the culture, and seeps into everything.

This is one such time, and the mega trend is this: the Internet is adapting us, not the other way around. It's our culture's Flux Capacitor, converting outmoded things into something the future can use. The next big thing is unlikely to be hatched from a garage in Palo Alto. Rather, it will be the power of collective technologies to transmute broader social concerns and, in so doing, change the nature of the problems themselves. Issues like job growth, family stability, equality, and citizen action will be set upon by digital dynamics, triggering a wave of change that will open new frontiers for many businesses.

To be sure, the social and business innovations poised to break through in 2013 have been percolating for some time. It's the intervention from people -- mostly younger -- empowered by social technologies that will give rise to changes.

The new year is still in its infancy -- it'll be exciting to watch these social innovations break through:

.......

6. Millennial overkill.

Those eager to engage Millennials will stop wondering about them and start winning with them.

For a decade, the world has tracked and translated the minutia of Millennial cyber-habits. It's a textbook in overstimulation. As Millennials, otherwise known as Gen-Y, enter adult life, they are no longer in a constant state of texting or celebration. They are finding work, settling down, and seeking a place for themselves in society.

Today, most insights about Millennials are too broad to be actionable. According to Carol Phillips, Instructor of Marketing, University of Notre Dame--and expert in Millennial buying behaviors, "Millennials are still different. But different in so many different ways, it is starting to defy generalization. The discussion is no longer whether we should target Millennials, but how we will win with Millennials. Winning requires more than generalizations." Expect a focus on targeted projects and smaller-scale campaigns that show promise for building more meaningful bonds as Millenials mature.

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