Although I’m not overly fond of the way we too easily pin labels on generations and then ascribe a lot of stereotypical behaviours to them, there’s no doubt that the next generation of young people entering the workforce have some markedly different ways of viewing the world.
That’s not entirely a bad thing. In fact, in many ways it’s a welcome change. But it does leave us “older generations” scratching our heads from time to time.
For example, I would never have dreamed of ever uttering the phrase “work-life balance” to any of the many bosses I’ve worked for over the years. In fact, if my feet hit the parking lot and my boss’s car was still there, I’d turn around and head back in. That’s just the way it was. Perhaps it was no coincidence then, that for most of my career, I ended up as a boss.
And based on hundreds of conversations I’ve had with dealers over the years, most are hard-wired more like I am, rather than the next generation of employees and managers who will soon be entrusted with running their businesses.
That’s why one of the most popular sessions at the annual CADEX Conference organized by the Nova Scotia Automobile Dealers Association (NSADA) is the millennial panel that I’ve had the pleasure of moderating for several years.
They provide dealers with honest, insightful and eye-opening observations about how they view the industry, their role in it, and what dealerships need to do to “get with the times.”
Dealers get a chance to hear directly from the next generation and hear their candid thoughts. They are different, and they represent your employees and increasingly your customers. So it’s wise to listen to what they have to say.
The CADEX millennial panel consists of a few students volunteered by the Automotive Business School of Canada (ABSC). They provide dealers with honest, insightful and eye-opening observations about how they view the industry, their role in it, and what dealerships need to do to “get with the times.”
The topic we debated on this year’s panel was social media. More specifically, I wanted to hear from the three students what they felt dealerships were doing right on social media and where they felt they were missing the mark.
I’ll give the dealers in the room a lot of credit. They listened very closely to the wisdom the students shared. Some of that wisdom, while no doubt credible, would be very hard to implement.
For example, there was a lot of discussion around building one-on-one relationships via social media. While this may work very well in one’s personal life, I think it’s a tough approach to scale across your
dealership’s customer and prospect lists.
At the same time, there were a few nuggets that I took away from it that I thought could be very readily implemented.
First, the students were all in agreement that the social media channel of choice is Instagram. Not Facebook. Not Twitter.
This is not to say you shouldn’t be participating in other social media channels. The students spend time in many of them, not just one or two. Instagram is becoming the primary channel for this age group according to our panel, and this does mesh with other reading I’ve been doing. It’s also consistent with the behaviour I see in my own kids.
The second key takeaway was a simple but powerful statement: it’s all about images. The students flat out said that if a post doesn’t have an image, they won’t even look. If it’s just words, they will keep on going.
The lesson here can be applied to all your marketing. So let’s make sure your image creation plan is a good one, for your websites, direct marketing and of course, your social media channels.
