Notice the millennial and the future of your business

Millennial – It’s the demographic terminology delegated to those who’s year of birth will coincide with them growing up through their teenage years surrounded by sophisticated and whacky technology. Also known as ‘Generation-Y,’ generally they are born between the 1980s and 2000.

In today’s context, it means that approximately 1/3 of those currently employed are from this millennial generation, but more crucially, according to Forbes “it’s predicted that by 2025 around 75% of the global workforce would have been born between the 2 decades.”

From a businesses’ point of view, there needs to be a productively moulded strategic plan in operation that incorporates the Millennial generation and beyond.

To adjust and prepare for the future, the most significant adaption that needs to be made is most obvious – technology. Let’s take the world of mobile apps for example. In one of our previous  blogs we portrayed the importance of embracing a mobile strategy into your business’ strategy. Let’s not reiterate, but bring in the relevance of the Millennials and their paramount importance to the future of your company.

My colleague was in a meeting the other day and mentioned a conversation that involved two Millennials and three baby boomers. The subject was checking information for an event. The two millennials said that if a company had an app that had all the event information in one place, that would be the first and only place they would check. The two baby boomers said they would be checking on desktop. The other baby boomer said they’d check both. There is evidently still a bit of a generation gap when it comes to technology and its adaption.

The quote “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” may beautifully apply here for the more pessimistic. With the transaction of technology gaining more and more momentum, there will come a time when the current generation of ‘baby-boom’ will be almost out dated if you class, too old to adapt, too experienced to understand a newly authentic digitalised revolutionary compliance. That time isn’t exactly now, but is predicted to be fast approaching.

Like mobile phones, people too want to be portable. Mobile applications connecting people from all corners of the world into one visual face-to-face portal, as though you were all in the same room. Mobility is the key, both for the device and the user. In essence the user desires more space and freedom than any generation that have gone before them. A well understood concept of millennial behaviour is their nomadic and adventurous requirements. Not being tied down, limited, trapped, without option and choice… similar to how phones are now.

Mobility is a hot topic for the majority of companies, however it is still evident that enterprise apps are still playing catch up with consumer apps. Just take a look at the table below (click to view).

What’s interesting, is that Gartner predicts smartphone sales will reach 2.1 billion units by 2019, which will fuel demand for apps in the enterprise that meet the high performance and usability of consumer apps. Phil Mottram, Enterprise Director at Vodafone, last year stated that customers’ demand for more flexible working practices were only set to grow. The point is companies need to realise sooner that people are changing, expecting similar experiences in the workplace as they would in their personal life.
So this is great for customers/employees, but how would this impact your business? Well, an Aberdeen survey of 240 enterprises suggests that the use of mobile apps designed to help employees completing their work, increased productivity by 45% and raised operational efficiency by almost as much 44%.
We haven’t even spoken about Generation-Z. The same generation that have probably never ‘not’ had a smartphone or tablet in front of them since they started to develop memory.

It’s not about specifically adapting all the businesses strategic intentions of direction, but more about understanding why merging the real world with the animus of current projection can open greater encouragement for future successes. If the business accepts the concept of digitalising ‘everything’ starting with their web context being transferred into a mobile platform, then the company can start to strive towards evolving with the common change and using it to it’s own advantage.

Don’t have a mobile app yet? Think it may be too expensive? Not only do we have app development services, but we also have a mobile app platform available, eliminating a lot of the costs and time associated with mobile app creation. Enquire today.

Imagery courtesy of: http://blog.thestorefront.com/experiential-marketing-is-winning-millennials-hearts-and-wallets/