Bridging the Generation Gap With New Home Buyers

 Bridging the Generations Gap with New Home Buyers [23:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

BuilderRadio Interveiews Gian Hasbrock, President, WOWISM

Remember the advertisement a few years back that proclaimed ‘It’s not your father’s Oldsmobile?’  (C’mon, I’m not that old… am I?) That campaign was an attempt for the automaker to rebrand itself as young and exciting.  It had failed to keep its product line current with a younger generation of buyers.

Sales researcher, analyst and home sales trainer, Gian Hasbrook, has made a study of how different generations approach home buying.  He shares his insights with us today.

“One of the problems we run into is that the normal assumption is that generations progress in a lineal way.  For example, since the young ‘Boomers’ were involved in culture wars, the assumption was that the next generation would be even more involved in tearing down cultural institutions.  As it turned out, ‘Xers’ weren’t interested in tearing things down; they were out for themselves.

The point is that each generation follows a predictable cycle that is more like a pendulum than a straight line.  If you can know where your purchaser is within a specific generational cycle, this can inform how you generate your traffic, what kind of branding you’re doing, your merchandising, and your customized sales process.

Each generation is going to respond differently to both marketing messages and sales techniques.  If you use marketing techniques to reach ‘New Millennials’ that worked on ‘Boomers’, they’ll take that as a sign of your ignorance about them.”

Whatever niche you’re targeting with your homes, you’re potential buyers are likely to span two or three different generational segments.  Hasbrock sites as an example the 50+ market, which currently includes three separate segments – the ‘GI Generation,’ the ‘Silent Generation,’ and the ‘Baby Boomers.’  “Those in that 50+ market have had to, by necessity, customize their presentations to suit the generation that they are dealing with.”

Generational Markers
Hasbrock mentions six distinct generational segments that are actively buying homes, from the ‘Silent’ generation born pre-WWII to the ‘New Melllinium’ generation that is just starting to become a powerful buying segment.

Interestingly, there are no precise dates that are agreed upon as to when each of these segments begins and the next takes its place.  Instead, each group is defined by outstanding events that take place in the world that act as defining moments for that generation and become shared memories – the assassination of JFK; Woodstock; the fall of the Berlin wall; September 11.  Hasbrock explains:

“These various generational ID markers stand as the bookends of adult personality formation. Every generation has their own.  Simply bringing them to consciousness in the form of a refreshed memory appears to be sufficient to forge the kind of rapport that used to take many hours to establish.  This rapport is based on the memory of shared experience, and the refreshing and re-telling of that experience allows for empathy in the listening process.  Empathy is necessary to build trust. Once you have trust you can create credibility, and a sale takes place when a belief system is transferred.  If that belief is reinforced with credibility, then obviously the sales process is streamlined.”

Knowing and understanding those events that are the ID markers for each generation, then, can allow a salesperson in her mid-twenties to identify and build rapport more quickly with buyers of a different generation.

This doesn’t mean that you’ll want to ask every 60-year old prospect if they were at Woodstock, but that understanding the events that generation relates to will give us hints as to how to address them and sell to them.  Every prospect will have their own personality, of course, as well as other cultural influences, but looking at the generational aspect gives us a direction to go to begin building rapport.

Of these different generations, the most active in today’s housing market is the Gen-Xers,  “those people born between 1961 and 1981,” says Hasbrock.  “The oldest of those are in their late 40s and the youngest are in their late 20s.  Those are strong home buying years.  The boomers have either bought what they’re going to buy or are stymied by the economy and are not as active in the market as predicted.”

So, that makes it official:  the Baby Boomers have past their power in the new home market to Generation X.  However, don’t expect this group to have the same impact on the market that the boomers did.  “There were 80 million people in the Baby Boomer Generation,” Hasbrock reports, “but there are only 35 million Xers – so few that the housing industry won’t be able to survive on their home purchases.  So, we have to start looking at what’s important to the 80 million New Millennials.

These represent the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity.   The leading edge of this generation are already beginning to look at home ownership.  What we do now will either alienate this group from home ownership or will bring them on board.  It is essential in product design, marketing and sales that we understand who we’re talking to.  Otherwise, we’ll be sending out our message to deaf ears.”

Oldsmobile”s efforts at reaching younger markets were too little and too late.  They failed to learn how to speak to a new generation, and never shed their perception as ‘dads’ car.  Oldmobile closed its production lines on April 29, 2004, after 107 years in business – a sober reminder that having a generationally appropriate product is one thing, but getting that message across to your specific target market is quite another.

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Contact Gian Hasbrock at www.WOWISM.com

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