Millennials have a somewhat schizophrenic relationship with the media. Depending on the study cited, they’ve been called everything from the most community-minded to the most narcissistic generation. The most entrepreneurial to the least financially literate. Name your bipolarity and there’s plenty of research papers happy to park Millennials firmly at either end.
What is clear, though, is that the largest generation since the Baby Boomers is a force that’s going to define our economy for many decades to come–which is why so many are desperate to truly understand and connect with them.
A little context certainly helps. Any major industry, from housing to banking to automotive, needs to come to grips with the ways in which the Millennial setting, or the socioeconomic realities into which they came of age, has necessarily shaped the Millennial mindset.
We’ve been fortunate to speak to and be inspired by hundreds of Millennials in the past year as we’ve built Doorsteps.com, but what’s most striking is how so much of what we’re learning applies far beyond our own industry. So here are three big ideas we’ve recently embraced that were inspired by the generation that defies easy definition.
#1. Design Or Die
For all the hand-wringing about the Millennial tendency to over-share and self-aggrandize online, one thing is clear: They’ve grown accustomed to great online tools that seamlessly organize or connect their lives.
That’s why, for example, the experience of buying a home can be so jarring for them. It’s a badly organized legacy system where key players can’t really collaborate in a way that makes sense or feels right. There’s a dozen or more people involved in a home-buying transaction–including inspectors, underwriters, escrow agents, and more–and yet the actual experience often plays out like a particularly convoluted game of telephone (with the best real estate agent and loan officers working double-time to compensate for crossed signals and missed connections).