Picture, picture, smile for the picture Pose with your brother, won’t you be a good sister? Everyone thinks that we’re perfect Please don’t let them look through the curtains. In her debut single “Dollhouse” last year, Generation Z artist and idol Melaine Martinez plays a little girl’s doll who ends every chilling refrain with: “I see…
It’s probably no surprise that “after the millennials” has been one of my key search terms for a while. I first started researching this generation in their infancy in the early 2000s, at a time when very little had yet been written about them. Covering this topic felt very much like entering a land where no man or woman has ever been. Then…
I recently came across an article in Aeon called “Against Generations“, which is one of the harshest, yet most eloquent critiques of generational research I have read. Author Rebecca Onion disagrees with the epistemological justification for segmenting people based on age cohort, and (rightly) contends that much of the research is arbitrary and the categories…
Research Chefs Association is the leading professional community for food research and development. Its members are the pioneers of the discipline of Culinology – the blending of culinary arts and the science of food. I recently attended their conference on the Future of Food, where I held a speech about Generation Z and their attitudes…
Ford’s recent report on Generation Z fails to mention the most obvious elephant in the room: Teens don’t care about cars anymore. Statoil recently published three scenarios for energy use in 2040. Not even the most low-carbon scenario envisioned the possibility that fossil fuels could constitute less than 75% of total energy consumption in 25 years. It…
The White House recently released a report where they labeled the youngest generation the “Homeland Generation”. A storm of speculations hit the internet soon after. How could the U.S. government choose such a paranoid and xenophobic-sounding epithet? Was this a creepy joke? Some claimed the White House took the name out of thin air. Others…
I recently did an opening keynote in Bergen, Norway for an organization called Norwegian Audience Development. I will write more about audience development in light of generational change in subsequent posts. In my presentation I discuss the works of historians William Strauss and Neil Howe and try to put their findings into a Scandinavian context….
Although type of content varies between older and younger users in the same cohort, we see that the mobile screen is taking over as the electronic time killer of choice, while the big screen TV will eventually reduce to a – not irrelevant, but increasingly distant – number two. It is also common for children to use…
When I worked with forecasting infant and family trends back in the 2000s there was a noticeably growing interest for nutrition among parents. Food was no longer only food, it had to be healthy, fresh, local organic, tasty and sometimes even “nutraceutical”. Mothers started breastfeeding their babies again, and for longer intervals. Busy parents turned even busier carefully…
