‘WE CANNOT CHANGE THINGS’

Ella Kieran, head of WPP’s Stream conferences for its clients, is the epitome of the highflying young global executive. At 31-years-old, she and her entrepreneur husband have a oneyear-old daughter, and she divides her time between London and New York. But the couple are still renting and she worries about her generation’s future.

“The pessimism of my generation is the sense that you cannot change things,” she says. “If you don’t have a lot of money, it does not feel as if you are going to get it. Now, as I have a family, I’m happy that baby food is better, thanks to five years of people before me saying: ‘This brand does not speak to me.’ But you guys got houses and we got slightly nicer shampoo.”

In the US and Europe, many millennials are disenchanted with their lot as they attain maturity. A UK Resolution Foundation study found that pessimists outweighed optimists by two to one when they were asked about their chances of improving on their parents’ fortunes. They are highly educated: 39% of British 25 to 39-year-olds are graduates, compared with 23% of those between 55 and 64. But their sophistication and ambition is not matched by security.

This is largely an accident of history. Older millennials entered the work force in the mid-2000s, and many lost jobs after the 2008 crisis. They were also caught by rapid inflation in house prices as interest rates fell and remained low. The milestones of leaving home, getting a job, marrying and having children have been delayed — 45% of 18 to 34-year-old Americans had done all four in 1975, but only 24% had in 2015.

It has spawned widespread distrust, both in organizations and individuals. A Pew study in 2014 found that only 19% of millennials believed that others could be trusted, compared with 40% of boomers and 31% of the generation Xers born between 1965 and 1980. Millennial faith in institutions is also low. “This generation is incredibly skeptical of governments and big corporations,” says Keith Niedermeier, professor at the Wharton business school.

Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days, a book about “why it sucks to have been born between 1980 and 2000,” says distrust is only natural among a generation that has to struggle for security. “If competition is the main feature of your world, you would be a fool to find people trustworthy,” he says. The preference for local, organic and craft products is also logical, in his view: “You want to be part of a circle of production and consumption that is not centered on enriching the 1%.”

BREAKING TRADITIONAL HABITS

The pattern of preferring smaller, independent brands and outlets extends to media consumption. Technology and social media have unleashed an extraordinary fragmentation in how they absorb information. In the US, they watch 19 hours a week of broadcast and cable television, compared with the average adult’s 34 hours, according to Nielsen. Radio stations have lower reach among millennials but 37% of them listen to at least one podcast a week.

New companies can reach millennials via social media, which further encourages fragmentation. Beauty is a prime example. Revenues of smaller brands grew 16% a year between 2008 and 2016, according to the consultancy McKinsey. Millennials will often experiment with edgier brands such as Urban Decay, which was acquired by L’Oréal in 2012. Makeup artists, including Charlotte Tilbury and Trish McEvoy, have attracted large followings.

Beauty’s expansion into a $250-billion global industry has been fueled by Instagram. Marla Beck, cofounder of Bluemercury, a US chain of cosmetics stores, cites the growth of face masks, including many Korean brands, as an example. Smaller companies are now selling black,