ECHO BOOMER

The advertising industry seems obsessed with finding fresh groups to sell things to, and then giving them names that are more or less meaningless. This is one of the more recent categories to come from the marketers’ imaginations, which may first have hit the public gaze in an article in Time in 1995. Echo boomers were born between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. They’re mostly the children of Baby Boomers (so, an echo of them, hence the name) and their oldest members are now moving into adulthood. They have been stereotyped as ethnically diverse children of the computer age, conformist, and untroubled by the generation gap. This group is large (three times that of the preceding Generation X) and is posing demographic problems, especially in education. The group is known by several other names — as the Millennial Generation (or the Millennials) and as Generation Y (or Gen Y, with individuals being Gen Yers). But the terminology is muddled, with Generation Y — as you might expect — being limited by some to the children of Generation X parents, or those born after about 1983. (And Generation X itself is actually a comparatively recent term, being popularised only by Douglas Coupland’s book of that title of 1991.)

Weaned on video games, Echo Boomers are the first generation to claim the computer as birthright. They troubleshoot the home PC and teach their parents the fine points of e-mail and Internet navigation.

The Salt Lake Tribune March 1998

Which isn’t to say echo boomers aren’t brand-conscious. Bombarded by ad messages since birth, how could they not be? But marketing experts say they form a less homogeneous market than their parents did.

Business Week, Feb. 1999

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