Long the butt of jokes about entitled, job-hopping hipsters, millennials are now the new grownups in the room. The oldest millennials are now 41 years old, 46 percent have families, 48 percent have mortgages and some are parenting teenagers. Today’s millennials are driven by values, financial concerns and a desire for authenticity.

Below, we’re sharing what the data says about millennials, including marketer takeaways.

Most millennials have financially supportive parents, their own children, and concerns about their families’ financial future, though many remain optimistic about the economy.

  • 3 out of 5 millennials are parents, according to a 2022 report by GWI.
  • 64 percent of millennials still receive regular monetary support from their parents, according to The College Investor. 
  • 36 percent of millennials are concerned about the cost of living and another 20 percent are worried about unemployment, per Deloitte’s 2022 Gen Z and Millennial Survey. Approximately 50 percent of millennials live paycheck to paycheck, according to the same survey.
  • 46 percent of millennials believe that, despite inflation, their personal and household finances will get better in the next six months.

Values and “value” drive millennials’ retail and brand choices. Millennials care about brand values and quality, in some cases more than price, and are more likely to share their love of product on social media

  • 50 percent of millennials stated that they thought about brand values when making a purchase and consider it more important than price in a 2021 study by MullenLowe, and 56 percent stated that they trusted brands to put the public interest over profit.
  • “Clean,” “high quality,” and “durable” were the top three phrases most likely to encourage millennials to buy a product, according to a YPulse study.
  • Millennials are the generation most likely to share their passion for a brand via social media (42 percent do so), and 60 percent have used a brand’s social media presence to contact customer service, according to a study by Sprout Social featured on Content Science.

The Takeaways:

Millennials have matured—they have adult responsibilities and a keen sense of value for money and are concerned about how their purchasing choices reflect their beliefs. Reimagining your marketing strategy around millennials means creating an active social listening campaign to understand what makes a product or service relevant to this audience and connecting with the influencers who reflect millennial values and passions. Marketers seeking to engage millennials should understand how much “who” they are matters to how they spend.