Marketing Insights: How the Class of 2022 Sees the World

Marketing Insights: How the Class of 2022 Sees the World

Do you market to college students and teens? If so, there are valuable insights for your smart marketing strategy in the annual Beloit College Mindset list, just released this week.

Each year, Beloit researchers compile key facts and findings about the incoming class of college freshmen and what the world looks like from their perspective.

As a marketing consultant, I find it fascinating; if this is your market, you may find it useful for marketing messages and campaign planning.

Here are just a few of the interesting observations from this year’s list for today’s 18-year-olds, who were born in 2000 and are the college class of 2022:

• They have always been able to refer to Wikipedia.
• They have grown up afraid that a shooting could happen at their school, too.
• Calcutta has always been Kolkata.
• When filling out forms, they are not surprised to find more than two gender categories to choose from.
• “You’ve got mail” would sound as ancient to them as “number, please” would have sounded to their parents.
• A visit to a bank has been a rare event.
• Mass market books have always been available exclusively as e-books.
• Oprah has always been a magazine.
• Films have always been distributed on the Internet.
• Human beings have always been living — not just traveling — in space.
• The United States has always been in Afghanistan.
• Same-sex marriage has always been legal somewhere.

See the full list at Beloit College Mindset List.