Professor Paige West

he tall blond man from Nebraska wears the clip-on microphone like a professional. He towers above us, the participants in his seminar on marketing at the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s annual meeting, and smiles a radiant white row of perfect teeth. He breaks the ice by revving up the caffeinated crowd when he says, “OK. OK. We are here to sell coffee! YEAH.” People in the audience cheer enthusiastically.

We are all here in this conference room in our attempt to understand why people buy flavored coffees, “single-origin” coffees like those from Papua New Guinea, Organic, Fair Trade, and the other seemingly socially responsible coffees. Our first task is to break into groups and come up with a list of the “essential qualities” of our “generation.” I am placed into the Generation X group because I was born between 1964 and 1982, but as a group, we don’t seem to have much in common. We try to make a list of essentialisms but don’t agree on any of them.

Mr. Nebraska (MN): “OK, so you Silent Generation folks, give us your qualities.”

“We built and defended this country,” says one man wearing a hat with a battleship’s name on it.

MN: “OK, now for the Baby Boomers, what do you have to contribute as a generation?”

“We are free thinkers!” shout several people at the same time.

MN: “What about the Xers?”

Several people from my seemingly stoic group now perk up and yell, “We are individuals,” “We question authority,” and, “We are fast technology!”

MN: “Now, what about you Millennials? Hello, Millennials? Where are my Millennials?”

Two young guys, who seem out of place in this older, business-suited crowd, shyly raise their hands. One of them says, "We are much faster technology.”

Everyone laughs. Then Mr. Nebraska begins his lecture.

For the next hour, he talks about American generations and how they hold the key to marketing. He begins with his analysis of the essential characteristics of each generation. “The Silent Generation” are a hardworking-loyal-sacrificing-dedicated-conformist-never questioning-authority-delayed-gratification-duty-before-pleasure group. Mr. Nebraska smiles broadly when he talks about these people, calling them “folks” and mentioning his grandparents. But then he tells us that they don’t have any purchasing power in the retail world, so they are a waste of time for the seminar.

He then moves on to the Baby Boomers. They can be summed up as essentially full of “optimism,” “team-oriented,” dedicated both to “personal growth” and “personal gratification.” They work long hours but have a “youthful mindset” which they maintain with “health and fitness.” Baby Boomer DNA is apparently encoded with the deep and abiding desire for iconic logos that symbolize gratification, indulgence, and defying age. Their DNA forces them to desire lots of choices among products, quick and thoughtful professional services, and upscale, consumer-comes-first-type retail culture.

It turns out that my generation is “liquid”: we have “liquid value” and a “liquid mindset.” We can “adjust to anything,” because we are independent-individualist-selfish-latchkey kids who rely on experience and have “no loyalty to anyone or anything.” My Generation X DNA makes me skeptical of logos, desirous of multiple similar products with a unique story behind each of them, wanting service that is “authentic,” during which I can “make a connection” and “share a story.” Culturally, I desire casual, flexible, liquid space where I can read the paper, check my e-mail, and chat with friends.

Finally, he moves on to the people born between 1983 and 2000, the Millennials. For Mr. Nebraska, Millennials want “achievement” but are “not driven.” They value “globalism” but are “community focused” and think that through introspection, they can change the world. Millennials are “encoded” with the desire for brands and logos. They value the “symbols of products” more than anything else. They want “global products” that are “political” and “environmentally friendly,” things that allow them to express their “self-knowledge.” They want to be “made to feel important.” And culturally, they want, and can find, “a meaning-filled experience” during “retail time.”

When he is finished with his description of the Millennials, he looks at us thoughtfully, pauses, and says, “This, this, is at the very core of people. It is who they are.” Later, he says, “The logo, product, service and atmosphere, or culture of a business” is the key to making your “generational pitch.” And he cautions the audience, “You want to listen to this, the cultures I’m talking about. They are in people’s DNA.”

Recently, anthropologists James Carrier and Daniel Miller, building upon the idea that economic activities have become increasingly removed from social relationships, developed a set of theories called “virtualism,” defined as the attempt to make the actual world conform to an abstract model of it. They use the concept to criticize economic policies where there is a tendency to abstract human decision making from its social context, and build models of the world and its workings that cannot take the full range or complexity of people’s daily lives into account. But these abstractions become virtualism when the real world is expected to transform itself in accordance with the models.

Miller argues that we can see this virtualism at work in the production of the contemporary consumer in economic discourses. He sees the creation of a “virtual consumer” who desires and buys certain things according to models of consumer behavior based on figures used in economic modeling. Mr. Nebraska and the organization for which he works deploy their generation-based models at trade conferences for everything from coffee, to sporting goods equipment, to pens. People like the coffee shop owners, small coffee roasters, and others at these conferences alter their business plans, selling strategies, and physical retail spaces to reflect the desires of virtual consumers. Virtual consumers are assumed to be white upper- and middle-class people in the formulation offered by Mr. Nebraska. In turn, we consumers, in all of our diversity, come to want the things they offer us, because we get used to them, and later, we come to expect them. Eventually, because the physical world has come to look like the virtual world, the consumer’s actual behavior comes to mirror the virtual behavior, and the virtual consumers become real.