We love labels.

We put them on everything. The first thing Adam does in Genesis after being created by God is to name the beasts.

We need labels because they help us identify things, not only to ourselves but between each other. Out of names and labels, humans can make assignments to categories. The whole thing helps us to make sense of our world. It simplifies how we process people and things and events that we feel we have figured out so that we can apply our mental energies to figuring out things we haven’t figured out.

In marketing and advertising, we love labels more than most. Especially when it comes to the audiences we seek to reach. There are a host of demographic assignments we make. But nothing holds a torch to the labels we put on generations.

The Pew Research Center recently tightened their definition of Millennial by constricting the birth years of those who would belong to it. They felt it was necessary to make "millennial" analytically meaningful while preserving what might be meaningful about the group coming up after them. The labels proposed this year for the next generation after Millennial have been Gen Z, iGeneration, and, vaguely, Post-Millennial. But what do any of these labels mean, and are any of them meaningful? Do marketers get anything useful out of applying them?

What we seem to get the most of when using generational labels is articles, books, consultants, and agencies claiming to identify, define, understand, and/or reach whatever the latest cohort is that attracts our attention. And sometimes there is a defining trait that gets teased out and rendered an insight.

But ultimately generational labeling simplifies thinking. Simple thinking is not always a good thing, but it is what politicians — and marketers — do best. The truth is that temporal cohorts matter less when identifying behavior for purposes of marketing or much else than three other main factors: 1) gender, 2) education level, 3) socioeconomic geography.

Generational labels have all been invented and applied post factobut then used to make pre facto claims. We retroactively create them but then think we can use them to predict things about the populations to whom the label apples. The first and only generation to ever be officially named by the government is the Baby Boomer. Every other generation before or since has been named retroactive of the birth trend to which the label has been assigned.

The generational label is not an explanation of behavior. It serves to provide a taxonomy that truncates thinking so that people talking to each other can skip complex social, behavioral, or cultural critical interpretation and get to a place where prefabricated judgements and concepts short-hand us to the next thing. It’s really just sociology with a sledgehammer.

Generational thinking is confusing being born in temporal proximity, or living contemporarily with an event, with how people behave. Did WWII define those who fought in it and children alive during it the same way?

Post war birth rates and migration to suburbs certainly had an impact, but it’s the economic impact that was far more significant than anything having to do with being born around the same time. Generational clumping does little to define traits (my parents, baby boomers, are the same age as James Taylor; I suspect they aren’t anything alike). Major historical events don’t define people, per se. They can be said to set the table, but they don’t help us predict if those sitting at the table are going to get fat.

Generational thinking was originally an intellectual invention devised for the purposes of trying to understand the movement of history. It was adopted by a variety of disciplines, but demographers and their dependents, marketers, adopted them most enthusiastically.

Generational labeling enforces a framework for thinking that does not necessarily articulate facts or truths about individual behavior. It DOES sometimes produce narratives that can articulate a truth about the culture. But then we have to ask, are generational labels saying something about a cohort's behavior, or something about the zeitgeist in which the label is applied? Point being, behaviors are more understandable -- and at times, predictable -- when looked at as a function of age or life-stage (a 20 year old in college acts differently than a 45-year old sending a kid off to college), education (a high school dropout has different prospects than someone with a masters), and gender (in spite of movement quests for equality, women and men want and need different products), and then following those conditions, economics (a 20 year old in college has different monetary resources than a 45 year old sending a kid off to college; the high school dropout has different monetary resources than the person with the masters; and women are still paid less than men).

Generational cohort is more of a lazy trick than a hard-working tool when it comes to extracting real assumptions about behavior, let alone assumptions about behavior that are applicable to marketing. The popularity of Cabbage Patch dolls can't be connected to generational thinking. Tie-dye's popularity was not a function of Baby Boomerism. Nirvana defined GenX... except for those people who didn't listen to them.

The focus on generational differences, since the definition of the Baby Boomer, has done a lot to change marketing. But I've long wondered: has it done anything to change results? How humans use media changes over time, as a response to lifestyle, availability, and changes in technology. I used to read a lot of comic books; that might have been a good way to target me in the 1980s. But I don't anymore, or certainly not in the way that I did. You aren't going to use comics to reach me now because of what I did when I was a teenager, are you?

What moves humans to action doesn't change very much even if how they move does. Humans still experience happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. As marketers we need to always focus on what makes people tick, not just on how they wind their clock.

The emphasis on generational labeling as a key to unlocking marketing success is not dissimilar to the emphasis on technology to do the same. It can be helpful if properly applied but does little to solve the mystery of whysomething is the way it is instead of whatsomething is.