Open Letter to Boomer Executives

Dear Mr. or Mrs. Baby Boomer Executive,

I hope you are sitting down. I have some startling news to share with you: your millennial initiatives are worthless.

The tools and tactics you have been using to “understand”, “market”, “speak”, “engage”, “connect” and “win” millennial customers are ineffective and will not increase your sales, regardless of how much data you gather and analyze. Even worse, you have likely lost sales due to them.

The secret to capturing the hearts, minds, and most importantly, wallets of the millennial generation is likely sitting one floor below you. Prepare yourself for a shock: your millennial employees are your most valuable and accessible asset when it comes to successfully marketing your business to the millennial generation.

Your own free focus group of millennials may be sitting 25 feet from you – not only are they available, but they WANT to be asked and to become involved. No one knows what the millennial generation desires or responds to more than actual millennials – you wouldn’t ask legal advice from a race car driver and you shouldn’t rely on baby boomers or gen x’ers to provide you with their ideas on how to market your business to millennial customers.

I know some of you can’t find it in yourselves to put aside your “Baby Boomer” pride and simply ask the twenty-something year-old employees sitting in five of the nine cubicles outside your office to express their marketing opinions, so that’s exactly where @AskAMillennial comes in.

Real, live, breathing millennials will answer anything you want to know about the generation that continues to be such a mystery to you and your cohorts. Better yet, no one will need to know how you gained your valuable insights and actually achieved your millennial marketing goals. This is the real deal for real results directly from the real source. What could be better?

Passionately Yours,

@AskAMillennial

P.S. If you are a CMO of Warby Parker, Bonobos, Julep or any other successful startup run by millennials, my sincere apologies for divulging your “secret sauce”.

P.P.S. Try asking some of the millennials at your office to email you a list of their favorite websites and why. Then spend at least 20 minutes on each of the listed sites so you can get a feel for the user experience and design – THIS is what your company needs to be echoing. You can follow up with asking for their favorite mobile apps, least favorite mobile sites…you get the idea.