It’s comforting.
It’s confident.
And it’s wrong/a lazy way to look at human behaviour.

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Let’s be blunt: generational labels are marketing astrology. They sound insightful, they’re fun to debate, and they give us something neat to put on a slide. Trouble is, they predict behaviour about as well as star signs.

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The idea that everyone born within a 15–20 year window shares consistent values, motivations, and behaviours is a beautifully packaged fiction. Elegant, even. But when you poke it, the evidence collapses faster than a flatpack desk without the Allen key.

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Social science has been clear for decades: once groups get big enough, the differences within them vastly outweigh the differences between them. Two “Gen Z” consumers are likely to have less in common with each other than either does with someone ten or twenty years older whose life circumstances look similar.

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Yet we continue to tell ourselves stories.

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A younger customer switches providers? “Classic Gen Z — no loyalty.”
An older customer does the same? “Rational, empowered decisionmaking.”

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Same behaviour. Different narrative.

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Generational thinking survives not because it’s true, but because it’s tidy. It offers simple explanations for complex outcomes and saves us from doing the harder (and more interesting) work of understanding context.

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Strip away the generational gloss and what’s actually driving behaviour looks far less magical and far more human:
life stage, income, stability, confidence, access, stress, responsibility, and opportunity.

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But “people under financial pressure shop around more” doesn’t fill a webinar quite like “Gen Z are redefining loyalty”.

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The real risk isn’t just bad segmentation — it’s missed insight. Once we treat generations as real, we stop looking for the nuance inside them. We swap curiosity for cliché and call it strategy.

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If we want segmentation that works, we need to move beyond birth years and focus on what genuinely shapes decisions: needs, motivations, constraints, and behaviours in context.

Generations aren’t insight.
They’re a shortcut.
And our customers — inconveniently — are far more interesting than that.