Next

Where to Live, What to Buy, and Who Will Lead Canada's Future

Darrell Bricker

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781443446549
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Longlisted for the National Business Book Award

Where will the world go after COVID-19? CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs Darrell Bricker's prescient and timely new book has the insights and the data to understand what we are going through and why, and who we still are despite the disruption. While the world around us has changed, Bricker's extensive research and analysis resonate for the future.

In this groundbreaking new book, Bricker, a Canadian expert in what Canadians will want and need, distills the trends based on real and extensive demographic data and dares to forecast what will come next. Why is Harley-Davidson making smaller motorcycles and changing the way they sell their bikes? Should restaurateurs be focusing on vibrant, frenetic restaurants offering the latest food fashion or on open, quieter restaurants that focus on tasty standard fare? What’s the fastest-growing sector in the housing market? Where should companies plan on setting up shop? Why do we face a population crisis? Which provinces will become the haves and which the have-nots? Where will Canadians be emigrating from, and where will they live? Should we be building more hockey arenas or basketball courts, or even cricket pitches?

Next is the first book in decades that offers an honest, often provocative prescription for where we will live, what we’ll be buying and who our leaders will be in the decades to come. Filled with stories of Canadians making critical decisions for their businesses and their personal lives, Next will appeal to a wide audience: anyone who is wondering where they should look for their next job or where they might plan on living in retirement—even how they will live in Canada’s ever-changing future.

Part 1

Who We Really Are

Chapter 1

Ready, Fire, Aim: Why Marketers Miss the Mark

Defining the Generations

How can we define Canada’s generations in a way that best helps us understand the future? It’s a challenge, especially when it comes to the post-Boomer period. There is a healthy cottage industry of academics and business experts making careers out of mapping multiple subsegments of the population born after 1965 in exquisite, contradictory, and often confusing detail. Let’s keep it simple. We will stick with a slightly modified version of what Statistics Canada uses to define generations. And rather than obsessing over precise birthdates, we’ll keep things more general.

Statistics Canada sees five main generations making up Canada’s population today:

• Pre–Baby Boomers: The first generation, born before 1946, is the pre–Baby Boom generation (the parents of Baby Boomers). Canada’s oldest citizens represent about 14% of our population, or about 5 million people alive today.
• Baby Boomers: The next oldest generation is the ubiquitous Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1965. They remain our largest generation, at 29% of today’s total population, or over 10 million people.
• Generation X: After the Boomers come their kids, whom Statistics Canada calls the Baby Busters or Generation X (the first of the alphabet generations). Members of Gen X were born between 1966 and 1971 and represent 8% of the population, or about 3 million people.
• Millennials: There’s some confusion among experts about whether Gen X and the next generation, the Millennials, are part of the same generation or constitute two different cohorts. We’ll go with Statistics Canada on this and treat them as separate generations. Statistics Canada defines Millennials (whom they call Generation Y or the Children of Boomers) as those born between 1972 and 1993. Millennials are the second-largest Canadian generation at 27%, or just under 10 million people.
• Generation Z: The final generation is those born after 1993, which Statistics Canada pegs as the first year of the internet. Gen Z represents about 8 million Canadians, or just over 20% of our population. These are the kids of Gen Xers and the oldest Millennials.

Another way to break down the generations has been proposed by Pew Research in the United States. It has some different age groupings and names, but is quite similar. Pew sees the following structure of generations:

• The Silent Generation: Born 1928–45
• Baby Boomers: Born 1946–64
• Generation X: Born 1965–80
• Millennials: Born 1981–96
• Post-Millennials: Born 1997–present

Like Statistics Canada, Pew struggles with capturing where the Millennials end and what they call the Post-Millennial generation begins. Their Millennial cutoff date of 1996 is important because it points to a generation that is old enough to have experienced the events of 9/11, as well as the effects of the 2008 recession. While Canadian Millennials were certainly affected by the events of 9/11, the recession of 2008 did not hit them the same way as it hit their equivalent cohort in the United States. The movie The Wolf of Wall Street doesn’t have the same cultural relevance for Canadian Millennials as it does for their American counterparts.

One interesting point about generations that’s emphasized by Pew is the importance of technology in separating them. Generations, says Pew, differ according to technological experience. For example, Baby Boomers saw the domination of TV; Gen X experienced a computer revolution; Millennials grew up with the internet. This is consistent with how we will look at generations. How generations learn to experience and interact with the world is a big part of how they construct their world view. But we can take the connection between technologies and generations too far. I’ve certainly seen it done.

No Generation Is an Island

I was sitting in the audience, waiting to go on at yet another conference. Like everybody else there, I was focused on the speaker. I’ve seen versions of the same presentation too many times. I bet you have too. A business consultant sporting a sleek, flesh-coloured head mic confidently stalks the stage. He is dressed in whatever business-casual uniform his ilk favours these days. A hand-steeple comes up to his face as he kicks off an anecdote about his toddler at home. Little Emma is a big fan of the iPad, he says. She has been since before she could walk or talk, so much so that the other day, when she swiped her tiny hand across a blank TV screen, she experienced her first existential trauma when nothing happened. Total confusion and frustrated tears ensued. The moral of the story is then delivered from the quivering lips of the tiny prophet: “Daddy, why is our TV broken?”

Yes, Emma’s generation will have a different relationship with technology than those before her. Every generation does. The truth, though, is that touchscreens and swiping will be but a brief interlude in humanity’s relationship with accessing and communicating information. Touchscreens are hardly generation-defining on their own terms. Unless, of course, you also consider eight-track tape players to be generation-defining for Boomers.

A decade from now, we will remember touchscreens with no more wonder than we do the stylus or the PalmPilot—remember those? That’s because we are now living in the world of “the internet of things,” a marvellous term attributed to British scientist Kevin Ashton. The internet of things is the network in our world that is embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and connectivity. These connections allow any object we carry or interact with, knowingly or unknowingly, to collect and exchange data. The internet of things allows objects to be sensed and controlled remotely, creating opportunities for direct interaction between the physical world and computers without humans ever having to intervene with a screen or any other interface.

Imagine buildings that sense whether you are cold or hot and automatically adjust the room climate to make you more comfortable. Imagine household appliances that sense when you are hungry and automatically prepare a meal based on your physical and even emotional needs. Refrigerators already exist that can communicate directly with grocery stores to replenish themselves.

Still, you can’t walk through a bookstore, visit a news site, or attend a business conference without being pummelled by a gaggle of experts emotionally relating tales about their own touchscreening toddlers and how their experiences will change everything. Okay, perhaps I’m being a bit harsh, but there’s a kernel of truth here. Focusing on the demands of a specific generation can be important, especially if it is the generation representing the most people. It is also correct to observe that, as generations work their way through the various stages of life—childhood, adolescence, work–family balance, retirement—the needs of the biggest generation will always wield the greatest power in the market. Think of how the tsunami of kids born in the Baby Boom defined that generation.

But no generation is an island. While the overall tone is set by the generation with the most people, the overall structure of the population and how it is moving or changing through time is more important than what’s happening within one cohort. Is the overall population getting younger or older? Which is growing, our cities or our rural areas? Is our population growth coming from domestic childbirth or from new immigrants? Where will new immigrants be coming from? Where will they be moving to? What is the prevalent family structure? This more holistic view of the population is the right one to focus on.

Generational Emblems

Although it’s important to understand which generation is numerically dominant, as well as the overall structure and movement of the population, we also need to avoid falling for easy, breezy stereotypes about generations. We love these stereotypes: they make for great headlines. But experts who look at a lot of data know generations are a complicated topic, especially when you consider that there can sometimes be bigger differences within a generation than there are between generations. For example, Millennial men and women have more divergent views on the benefits of technology than Boomer and Millennial men do.

Nonetheless, saying that generations are complicated doesn’t mean we can’t summarize the dominant traits that make up their personalities. By treating these traits as heuristics, or rules of thumb, we can focus our analysis so that it doesn’t become all trees and no forest. While I don’t want to be overly simplistic, it’s possible to say that within each generation there are defining personality tendencies or traits constructed from the specific cultural emblems that its members accumulate, especially during their formative years, and that add up to a generational world view. What are cultural emblems? Think big news events, the state of the economy when one is entering the job market, cultural practices, technology, fashion, movies, music, and the like. These experiences tend to affect a generation for life.

An emblem marks what a person has lived through for others to see. It’s part of who they are to themselves and to the rest of the world. If you ever watch two old soldiers greeting each other, you may notice how they subtly look above each other’s right pocket to inspect the ribbons or medals. These emblems communicate, without the need to ask, what each has been through in their respective military careers. Generational emblems serve a similar function in the civilian world. If you are a certain age, there is an assumption that you wear the emblems of your generation, for both good and bad, and that they define who you are, what you value, and how you will react to what happens around you.

A good example of a generational emblem in action is music: the soundtrack of our lives. There’s some solid evidence, based on analyzing music-streaming data, that your life’s playlist is mostly filled in by the time you reach the age of 30. While there’s room for a spectrum of individual tastes, when it comes to song selection, you are likely to have more in common with members of your own generation than with the generation that preceded you or the one that follows you. It’s a good bet that if you end up in a retirement home with an enlightened staff, you and your neighbours will be happiest if the sound system plays songs that were popular during the thirty formative years most of you shared. Think about it. Fifty years from now, the halls of Canada’s retirement homes will be filled with the autotuned melodies of Drake. Talk about dystopia.

Yes, there are exceptions to every rule. Not every kid who reached adolescence during the sixties bought into the counterculture. Not everyone followed Timothy Leary’s advice to “tune in, turn on, and drop out” on their way to the Haight, Yasgur’s farm, Yorkville, or Gastown. The truth is that many, many more did just what their parents did: they went to school and work. But it’s also a safe bet that whether they were a flower child or a factory worker, they did what they did while listening to the Beatles and the Stones, or other acts that dominated the music charts of their thirty formative years. That’s how generational emblems are forged.

The Mainstream Wins

While I like the idea of emblems and the generational world views they help to define, I don’t want to leave the impression that these world views are impervious to change. They are more like tendencies than iron-clad rules. There will always be exceptions. My caution to you is not to be overly distracted by these exceptions. The mainstream will always have more influence on creating the structure of consumer demand. The mainstream wins because they are the dominant trend; they have the numbers. And market success is ultimately a game of numbers.

Let’s take the second half of the 1970s. This was an important time for both late Boomers and early Gen Xers. Whenever I see retrospectives on the late seventies, the narrator inevitably states that punk rock was a cultural phenomenon that cast a very long shadow over the entire era. The year that was especially important for punk was 1977, when the most influential punk band, the Sex Pistols, released what was to be their only original album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. (A strong case can also be made for the Ramones’ self-titled album, released in 1976, or the Clash’s London Calling, released in 1979.)

But 1977 wasn’t just a big year for punk rock, it was a big year for pop music overall, maybe its biggest ever. Three of the top-selling albums of all time were released in 1977: Bat Out of Hell by Meatloaf; Rumours by Fleetwood Mac; and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. All three have sold north of forty million units worldwide to date. Add in Hotel California by the Eagles and you see how big 1977 was for music. (Okay, I’m cheating, as Hotel California was released in December 1976, but that’s just a rounding error. It doesn’t detract from what I’m saying about the times.)

Never Mind the Bollocks has sold around three million units since it was first released. So while punks get an awful lot of attention from pop culture experts when they talk about what was important in the late seventies (and maybe they might be forced to give an embarrassed nod to disco), most people younger than 30 at the time were grooving to “Rhiannon,” “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” “Night Fever,” and “Life in the Fast Lane.” These songs dominated the mainstream soundtrack of that period, not “Anarchy in the UK,” “Clampdown,” or “Blitzkrieg Bop.”

How Emblems Influence World View

The consequences of world views and emblems shared by the parents of today’s Boomers were well described by the American sociologist William Whyte in his seminal study of American society, The Organization Man. Whyte’s key point about those whom journalist Tom Brokaw called the “Greatest Generation” was that they have a generational world view that is strongly influenced by the deprivations of the Great Depression and the sacrifices of the Second World War. These events conditioned them to believe that organizations and groups can make better decisions than individuals, and that serving an organization made more sense than advancing their individual careers. Whyte argued that this created a generation of risk-averse executives and workers who faced few consequences because of their loyalty and could expect to stay in a job for life if they toed the company line. They were committed and loyal to their employers, their spouses, their political parties, and other public institutions, as well as to specific products and brands.

The public opinion and population statistics in Canada align with Whyte’s description, although he was writing about the United States. The parents of Canadian Boomers, along with older Boomers, were and are like Whyte’s Organization Man. They valued loyalty, including to their employers. Statistics Canada says two-thirds of Boomers entered their 50s (in the eighties and nineties) in long-term employment, in jobs they had held for at least twelve years with the same employer. More than half had worked for the same firm or organization for far longer, often twenty years or more. Therefore, loyalty is an important generational emblem for the Greatest Generation and for the tip of the Baby Boom.

Which emblems will make up the generational world view for today’s kids, Generation Z? Some possibiliti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Welcome to New Canada
• Part 1: Who We Really Are
• Part 2: Where We Live
• Part 3: Who We’ll Be
• Part 4: What’s Next
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Also by Darrell Bricker
• Copyright
• About the Publisher