Melbourne millionaire Tim Gurner went off to fame recently after stating on the TV program 60 Minutes, that millennials ought to save by skipping on their expensive avocado toasts in order to buy their dream home. Avocado toasts are now the new BigMac index on purchasing power.
Things change quite fast in the age of information where the economy doesn’t serve well as much as it did for millennials’ parent. Back then household expenses were limited to the analog world of mortgage payments, groceries, and transportation bills.
Today the door revolves the other way. The new generations have different goals that don’t reflect the Baby Boomers’ ambitions and we all should take notice about it. The Avocado Toast Index is becoming the new marker of the purchasing power for which this new generation of tech-citizens is being measured for.
Millennials are drifting away from repeating the financial patterns of their parents and getting into debts by mortgaging an over-inflated piece of property they can release in 20 to 40 years from now from their bank. Millennials tackled the new reality of economics by denying the old approach of becoming subjugated to indebtedness.
Those born between the 80s and the 90s are defying the status quo by following their own interests on housing rental and purchasing, away from any real estate expectation. Millennials prefer living downtown cities in order to experience the city lifestyle without the stress of the suburban commuting and social isolation.
Markets ought to observe this generation much closer without drawing cheap and antiquated marketing data conclusions. There’s a lot that needs to be analyzed and understood from the millennial user point of view which can bring favor to many companies that are willing to listen.
There’s so much we can learn from the Avocado Toast Index because it has now given us a way to understand the spending habits of a growing and intelligent community.
The presence of digital markets has changed the relationship between the user and companies; the engagement of behavior and values is today more sophisticated because of the introduction of variable in the UX. Too many companies still struggle understanding how to connect with their customers.
It’s important to makes sure companies understand their target audience quite well in order to assume the product/service meets the user expectation. Many startups fail in their early years because stakeholders do no focus on the user side. Creating a product comes with a complex structure of passages and too often companies loose sight of their target audience.
This happens when the business persists with conservative marketing strategies that belong to the analog era and don’t consent innovation to happen. Designers begun to break away from the traditional doctrine of the marketing department to seek new philosophies, simply because there’s much more than just using analytical data and projections to address the user’s identity.
The best vivid example of disrupting the traditional scheme of strategic thinking can be attributed when Apple introduced theiPhone. A company that had nothing to do with the telecom field managed to swipe clean a market, introducing something they never worked on before. Then we all know what happened to the conservative approach on UX design where the Blackberry almost disappeared from the market because the managing team couldn’t understand the new approach to touch screens.
This is what companies can learn from designers: move away from your comfort zone and embrace changes to stay competitive, even if crazy ideas are thrown on the table; they are worthy to be considered. Consumer behavior changes very fast through external factors that cannot be controlled by companies, so it’s essential stakeholders follow a progressive UX design that has the ability to truly connect with the user in order to cater to its needs. Without that companies are just building products and services just for themselves.
“I miss you already. I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.”
