A fun demography fact is there aren't official definitions of generational cohorts*.
Making this even more fun, different people and groups often use different definitions and even different names for the various cohorts.
For example, the generation born between roughly 1980 and 2000 used to be called "Gen Y" (and still is by many).
But that name fell out of favor a few years ago. Instead, "Millennials" is now the commonly used term for this generation.
We also don't yet have a consensus around the name for the generation that follows the Millennials.
Gen Z is used by many, but it seems to make less sense now that we aren't using Gen Y.
The highly respected Pew Research Center has decided to put a stake in the ground and give this generation a name.
Proving they're researchers and not marketers, they've decided on the catchy name "Post-Millennials" for the newest generation.
Their chart on the right shows how they fit relative to the other generations.
In addition to coining a name, they've also picked dates for end the of Millennial generation (1996) and the beginning of the Post-Millennials (1997).
We - and most others - have used 2000 as the last year of the Millennial generation.
But as Pew points out in their article Defining generations: Where Millennials end and post-Millennials begin:
"... we believe 1996 is a meaningful cutoff between Millennials and post-Millennials for a number of reasons, including key political, economic and social factors that define the Millennial generation’s formative years."
These include the 9/11 terrorist attack, the Middle Eastern wars and the Great Recession.
They also point out the "always-on" nature of technology that more or less started with the release of the iPhone in 2007. Key quote:
"The iPhone launched in 2007, when the oldest post-Millennials were 10. By the time they were in their teens, the primary means by which young Americans connected with the web was through mobile devices, WiFi and high-bandwidth cellular service. Social media, constant connectivity and on-demand entertainment and communication are innovations Millennials adapted to as they came of age. For those born after 1996, these are largely assumed."
In other words, while Millennials are digital natives, they aren't "always-on" natives in the same way those born after 1996 are.
We agree with Pew's reasons for this shift and being consistent with them has a number of advantages.
So we're going to switch to their generation definitions.
We've done some preliminary work and we don't think this shift will have a major impact on our study findings.
So Post-Millennials it is.
* The U.S. Census Bureau has sort of officially defined the Baby Boomers, but not other cohorts.
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