Are you my mother's pop cultural influence study?

April 16, 2012 10:54 AM

Help me find a recent study about multi-generational taste being more similar! I remember seeing a blurb about a study (market research not academic) that millennial and their parents have more similar pop culture tastes. There was some clever term or acronym for it that spoke to the blurring of generational taste. And now I need it!

I subscribe to a lot of research newsletters -- Forrester, Gartner, Hoovers -- and read a lot of blogs, LinkedIn feeds and various other things.

In the last two weeks, I saw a short blurb about this study and now I'm in the midst of a project that desperately needs it ASAP, and, of course, I can't relocate it.

The general gist was that millennial/teens/tweens were a more powerful pop cultural influence on their parents and that families had more similar tastes than in previous generations/years.

I've searched Forrester for "teens", "generation" and done Google searches on the key words above, but there's just slogs of things and no such article.

Help?

posted by Gucky to society & culture (7 answers total)

Are you thinking of Temple University professor Ayalla Ruvio's "consumer doppelgängers" study? It got a LOT of press, here's one reference.
posted by desuetude at 11:55 AM on April 16, 2012

That's a good one, but no. It highlighted media tastes -- music, etc. -- in the blurb.

(That's a great reference for something else I'm working on, however.)
posted by Gucky at 1:39 PM on April 16, 2012

Reminds me of this 2006 NY Mag article about "Grups." Maybe something in there will jog your memory.
posted by (alice) at 3:40 PM on April 16, 2012

It's not exactly what you're asking, but you're not thinking about Kurt Andersen's article in Vanity Fair are you?


You Say You Want a Devolution?

For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new..... try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey—both distinctions without a real difference—and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco. Except for certain details (no Google searches, no e-mail, no cell phones), ambitious fiction from 20 years ago (Doug Coupland’s Generation X, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow) is in no way dated, and the sensibility and style of Joan Didion’s books from even 20 years before that seem plausibly circa-2012.
posted by RandlePatrickMcMurphy at 5:25 PM on April 16, 2012

Good input, all, but this was definitely implications of marketing to them/market research rather than journalistic.

Hmm. This might just drive me mad.
posted by Gucky at 7:13 PM on April 16, 2012

For sake of completeness/future reference, it looks like I saw some cut of the data from Harris Interactive: http://www.harrisinteractive.com/vault/2012_HPOLL_YouthPulse_YouthEquiTrend_Overview.pdf

Which pairs with Nickelodeon to put out a yearly survey, as well as lots of other cuts of the data.

I can't, of course, refind exactly what I read, but it gives me (and hopefully someone elses) a lead if the need comes up again.
posted by Gucky at 3:17 PM on April 17, 2012

It was in the Entertainment Weekly story about the return of boy bands."The Family GPS" was the name of the 2009 Nickelodeon report. Sorry for the mobile link. Fifth graf.
posted by purpleclover at 9:34 PM on April 17, 2012