Three reasons:
* The wild ride that was Boomer consumerism is going to grind a screaming halt really soon. When the Boomers go, their comparatively poorer sucessors are going to be a much harder sell.
* Gen X and especially Gen Y much harder to market to. Have a look at advertising from the 1950s and 60s: do you think for an instant that said pablum is going to work on a cynicism-steeped GenX’er, or a Gen Y who has been marketed to death at?
* X and Y are incredibly fickle. It’s hard to woo them and not nearly as easy to keep them.

Marketers face an uphill battle, and press-releases like this are a sign of both desperation, and the self-delusion that they’re still in control.

We young people aren’t any more homogenous than anyone else, so why does everyone keep trying to figure out what we’re like? We’ve got artsy people, green people, drag racing people, playful people, aggressive people, sensible people…

I disagree. Young people entering the age where some may be purchasing (or directing the purchase of) a new vehicle are the most homogenous market any manufacturer is likely to encounter. They’re going to be at or around high school graduation age; they’ve spend the majority of their life living in the same town or area, going to school with largely the same friends and sharing the majority of their life experiences centered around their education. The majority will have gone to public school where they’ve been fed a predetermined level of information to pass tests and have been packed in too tightly to have picked up the ability to effectively think independently. The necessity of orderly discipline without the capability of genuine punishment has brought on an atmosphere where questioning authority has been actively discouraged.

Almost all young people at this stage will effectively seek to achieve the same thing with their automotive purchase: peer acceptance. They will all do this differently using different methods but that is what they are buying. They don’t want a car for themselves; they want it for what others think of it. Affordability/economy and reliability will narrow down the pool but those are just realistic enablers of the transaction.

Having spent most of my short career (I too cap the tail on Gen X at just about to turn 30) in product design/engineering I can say the best marketing types I’ve worked with don’t “do” marketing but product management. The best I’ve worked with all have the attitude that people don’t know what they want and if you give them exactly what they ask for you’re guaranteed to screw it up. A customer is a fickle bitch and you have to give them what they will buy, not what they “want.” People are stupid and really don’t know what they want. There, I guess I really am a Gen-X’er.

I don’t get the opposition to “Gen-Y” but I guess that opposition is somewhat inherent in the generalized personality traits of someone in the age group. I had a buddy in middle/high school whose garage band was “Generation Why?” which is itself endemic of the sterotype.

Sure, we’re more likely to be environmentalists or interested in lots of buttons. But look at these results – “more likely” translates to 35% putting green as their priority. That’s still only a third; not wanting a Prius does not make you unusual among young people, no matter how unusual you’d like to be. (Okay, I suppose that’s an eternal characteristic of the younger generation, wanting to stand out and be different – old people may like the xB too but it still gets more young buyers than most cars.)

He added, “just because I can’t afford them doesn’t mean they aren’t cool”. Affordability shouldn’t come into the equation when defining “coolness”.

Generations are hard to define. “Baby Boomer” really defines people who were members of large, post-war families, not a specific range of dates. This is why someone who immigrated with their parents from postwar Europe is probably not a boomer, but the child of a family of four or more from middle America is.

There’s also a certain amount of judgemental attitude. You get this feel from how Boomers regard Gen Y: superficial, spoiled, achievement driven. Of course, these are the children of the Boomers, and it’s the Boomers who are trying to define them, and the paternalism is pretty much a given. Giving them a label, especially a trivialising one, is part of this (Generation Nintendo, iGeneration, Boom Echo, Boomlets).

Of course, I’m at the tail end of Generation X. Bitterness, cynicism and stylish despair are more or less our defining aspect.

Demographics is a tricky thing. Enthusiasts want one thing, the young and silver-spoon-in-mouth idle rich another, the young and recently employed a third, and the young and just bought a house/had a kid a fourth. And then there’s differences by region, sex, political leaning, etc, etc. It isn’t quite as cookie-cutter as Toilet, Douche and Tomato make it out to be.

Gen Y isn’t hugely different from it’s predecessors (it isn’t likely to be that different from it’s successors, either). Where X, Y and such differ from the Boomers and their predecessors is twofold:

One is that younger buyers are usually a little less presupposed, and a little more likely to be consider a different product, so you have an opening there.

Two—and this is the hard one—they have an inbuilt resistance to oblique, ham-fisted marketing: it’s much, much harder to get a marketing toehold because these generations have been so oversaturated that you really do need to be tricky to get to them.

Infomercials do not work. Product placement does not work. Slick TV/Radio/Print campaigns do not work. Viral campaigns are slightly effective, but not so much as the Swinging Dicks at the companies that develop them think. The work you need to do to get traction is brutal, and it’s often more luck than anything else. Obliquely marketing to GenX/Y is a really good way to trigger a cynicism response, too—god help you if you market on green and aren’t; it’s a good way to end up in branding Hell.

Of course, good product helps a lot. There’s no magic formula: do the groundwork, pound the focus groups, test your markets, make the product as good as you can—preferably better than your competitors—and make sure the supporting campaign makes sense.

Failing to figure out who will actually buy your product is a really good way to kill your whole brand. GM did this with the Aztek: they built something that there was patently no market for because their prepatory work was terrible.

The Kia Soul above is a good point. Yes, it has youth market written all over it, but if it succeeds, it will succeed not because of oblique marketing, but because it’s cheap (unlike the Honda Element), practical, capable and reliable. If it’s a cheap, unreliable piece of crap, or is lacking in useful features, or is unattainable because Kia dealers play hardball, then all the Hipness in the world won’t save it.

That said, it explains what would be cool in a car. Causal Observer and AKM nailed it. Buttons that do cool stuff, like park the car.

Overall, driving is dead to this generation, only to live on in the next generation of enthusiasts. And we’re all too poor to buy what we want new anyways….

Personally, I’m 28. I’ve always had handling/ drivability as my major selling point on a car. After that, acceleration, braking, and good visibility. I consider those to be important safety features. I’d rather avoid an accident than just survive one.

But this pretty much has the ideals of the generation spot on. They want their car to look cool and be cheap to run (Technically good mileage is “green”) and buy. Honestly they can find a way to make any car exciting (see above).

As for the statistics of this, I imagine they were allowed to select more than one reason for a car being “cool”.

For me affordability is cool. Especially if the car is safe (a relative term) and can fit the wife and kids. Oh, and I’d like it to have sliding doors so the kids stop wacking the other car in the garage.

I’m 29 and own a 1997 Buick LeSabre and a 2004 Toyota Camry. All I need are the wrap-around sunglasses and the old man tranformation will be complete.

Some of each I suspect. I was musing one afternoon that we’d owned every possible variation of engine placement/drive: Front engine w/ FWD, 4WD, RWD, and a Rear Engine RWD.

My wife’s response: “The engine drives the wheels?”

It was just something that she’d never thought about, and still doesn’t understand. For that matter, I always pump her gas for her too, so….

As for the new generation’s opinions about cars, I have a couple of ancedotes there too. My 23 year old niece is fiercely resisting buying a car – any car. She just doesn’t care about wheels. The only things she came even close to considering was a Mini… or a Jeep. “Cool” is probably the only common element between those two vehicles.

Finally, in Japan, car sales are way down partly because young people have stopped buying cars -
http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/30/youth-in-asia-japanese-sales-plunge-as-young-people-abandon-car/

So maybe they’re just ahead of the curve there.

Yes and no. I totally agree with you on a short-term basis, but grabbing the customer while he/she is young is a must. I mean, most of us remember our 1st cars with fondness, even if they were P.O.S., and that certainly helps future sales. Although, I admit, not as much as the ever-present “better than the neighbors” attitude, which is the real reason why so many people stretched themselves into the next category, such as entry-lux.

Trust me, F-150 and Mustangs will do just fine. It’s mind boggling to me that the marketing people are trying to go after the young people anyway; not on stuff like cars. Targeting youth might be great for cell phones and ipods, but not so much once you get out of the Christmas gift price bracket.

She ended up buying the blue one.

Is that a generational thing or a female thing?

As women stay single longer into their 30’s and are out buying cars on their own, I think we’ll see more and more cars built specifically for women.

My apologies to B&B’s female population.

Then again, I might just be in the minority.