This House Believes Generational Cohorts are BAD for Research!

Back to Blog

This House Believes Generational Cohorts are BAD for Research!
Posted on February 5, 2025 by Vanessa Chirayus

Reading Time: 3 minutes

At AURA Insight’s Generational Insights: Exploring the Changing Consumer Landscape, our very own Colonel Mustard Lucy Davison and NED Danny Russell took the stage to debate whether it’s time to retire generational cohort labelling. After an in-depth discussion with fiery evidence from both sides, the audience of clients voted: generational cohorts are bad for research.

As insights professionals, we must always re-evaluate the way we understand consumers. This debate was not about winning, but all about questioning, learning, and finding better ways to make sense of the world.

Catch up on why we, Keen as Mustard, wanted to challenge the status quo on generational cohorts in this blog.

Why generational cohorts are bad research – and even worse marketing.

Not so long ago, segmentations and targeting were tragically simplistic – resulting in sweeping stereotypes applied to large groups of people, like those classic ads assuming all women strive to please their husbands with spotless homes and by looking beautiful.

But marketing and insights has changed – thank goodness. We now use sophisticated methods to understand people’s nuanced attitudes and behaviours, we try very hard to reach and include diverse audiences and to understand them. We all have DE&I policies and do our best to overcome biases, not to discriminate, generalise or stereotype.

However, the concept of generational cohorts takes the opposite approach. Taking one single variable (birth year) to make sweeping generalisations about people is akin to basing your marketing strategy on astrology (birth month). However, no marketing professional would propose targeting Leos and Capricorns; the concept is ridiculous. Yet we actively encourage clients to think in terms of generational cohorts.

Attributing shared values or traits to entire generations risks reinforcing simplistic narratives that obscure the diversity within large populations. Consider this: in the U.S. alone, there are 72 million millennials1 – the equivalent of the 19th largest country in the world. Generational cohorts aren’t just inaccurate – they are massively reductive, undermining the complexity of human behaviour and promoting biases.

We all have our own examples of individuals who do not fit these stereotypes – but the arbitrary cut off dates are ridiculous. According to the concept of generational cohorts someone born in 1964 has more in common with another ‘Boomer’ born in 1945 than a close colleague born in 1965.

But just don’t take our word for it.

The scepticism around generational cohorts led 150 social scientists to sign an open letter to Pew Research – written by Philip N. Cohen from University of Maryland – asking them to stop using these classifications.  They argued it imposes “qualities on diverse populations without basis, resulting in the current widespread problem of crude stereotyping”2. In 2023, Forbes reported that Pew would shift its focus to comparative research into age groups over different time3 (e.g. examining 20-year-olds in 1980 vs 2000 vs 2020).

We are not suggesting that we should not do research into different age groups, but supporting the view that they are different, diverse and changing – not that a set of attributes and behaviours is cast in stone at birth. The logical conclusion of that idea is that researchers could just pack up and go home –we already know all we need to know about people because of the cohort they are born into.

It perpetuates ‘cohortism’.

‘Cohortism’, a term we coined in the debate, is the sibling of ageism. A 2024 study by The Adaptavist Group surveyed 4,000 knowledge workers across the U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia, and Germany. 40% said using cohorts is a slippery slope towards colleague exclusion, while 45% reported that it fosters harmful stereotypes4.

What worse: it’s untrue!

The largest study into age cohorts we could find, (by Valuegraphics) cited by Forbes and involving 750,000 people in 180 countries – showed that generational cohorts have no more in common with each other than any other single demographic factor, like race, education, and income5. Similarly, a study by BBH Labs, illustrated that generational cohorts have an average cohesion index of only +1.3. In contrast, other groupings – like ‘daily nut eaters’ and ‘Orangina drinkers’ – scored significantly higher, with cohesion indexes of +3.8 and +4.5, respectively.

It’s actively harmful

According to the Centre for Ageing Better (2020), one in three people in the UK reports experiencing age discrimination.   The Equality and Human Rights Commission states people of all ages say they experience it more than any other form of discrimination6.

So, as insights professionals, this prompts the question: Why are we supporting generational cohorts by producing endless studies into different groups and how they supposedly think and feel?

1 https://www.bbh-labs.com/puncturing-the-paradox-group-cohesion-and-the-generational-myth

2 https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSecsM1JavYMlNI-XlKDYngFKsEFBGFs_imv7R5KO8e15NYeCg/viewform

3 https://www.forbes.com/sites/sheilacallaham/2023/05/28/pew-research-center-new-stance-on-generational-labels-with-a-caveat/

4 https://www.pcma.org/its-time-to-ditch-tired-generational-stereotypes/

5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/sheilacallaham/2022/05/15/generational-labels-why-its-time-to-put-them-to-rest/

6 https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/22776/html/#:~:text=One%20in%20three%20people%20in,any%20other%20form%20of%20discrimination.