Good Guys and Bad Guys - is our industry really like that?

What’s in a name? Or particularly a label?

We all seem to have one these days. If we’re not a first time buyer we’re a second stepper, then becoming an empty nester and ultimately a down-sizer.

These are the labels of convenience beloved of public relations people and some journalists to try to push things from air-fryers to bungalows, targeting a demographic group and pitching the product accordingly.

But does any of this actually relate to real life, especially when the marketing world in particular add powerful images and descriptions to the labels to turn such groups into mere caricatures?

Some clever research by financial services company Unbiased has looked at over 2,500 articles in mainstream personal finance media, many of them generated by press releases in the first instance.

Unbiased does what I consider to be a good job at decoding the messages and perceptions of these different labels.

•    53% of personal financial conversations in the media portray Baby Boomers negatively, often as ‘selfish’ or ‘greedy villains’;

•    57% cast millennials as victims, describing them as hapless and disadvantaged;

•    Gen X are presented as irrelevant, appearing in just 5% of articles despite representing about 20% of the population;

•    Crucially, almost half of articles comparing Boomers to other generations (48%) are antagonistic, promoting conflict over shared experiences;

•    This rises to 56% when comparing Boomers and Millennials, and 86% comparing Boomers and Gen Z, emphasising generational differences.

Unbiased also talks of “emotive language fostering feelings of disempowerment” - and you can see what this means:

•    Boomers: are described using words like ‘lucky’ and ‘comfortable’ that imply passive success, suggesting they are wealthy due to birth rather than effort. Unbiased says this can be particularly disaffecting for Baby Boomers who are not financially secure or those who have worked hard throughout their lives;

•    Millennials: face a negative landscape dominated by words related to poor mental health and financial wellbeing (‘stressed’, 'frustrated', 'anxious', ‘overwhelmed’), reflecting the idea that they are a 'stuck’ generation. Any positive language is largely passive implying that they are ‘waiting for a windfall’ rather than working to achieve their financial goals;

•    Gen Z: face more negative psychological traits that express their more precarious state of affairs (‘lazy’, ‘stressed’) as well as generational merging with millennials (‘resent’, ‘risk’, ‘challenges’).

You can see almost immediately that similar emotive language and lazy writing affects the property world too. Just read a press release by some of the activist groups to see how they concentrate on younger ‘victim’ renters rather than the increasingly-older age groups in the private and social housing sectors, and you won’t have to read for long to see the vitriol reserved for some ‘older’ owner occupiers and just about all landlords.

Likewise, the negative perceptions of estate and letting agents spill out of reporting in the mainstream press, unaware - by accident or design - that many of these agents are not necessarily well-paid, not necessarily uncaring, and not necessarily even able to afford to own their own homes.

It needn’t be this way, and in reality it seems that it isn’t.

For every smug baby boomer I know, there are several who are amongst the most generous volunteers in their community and donors to charities; not every person who rents is a down-at-heel oppressed victim and each year many buy a home (293,000 first time buyers in 2023 consisted of a high proportion of tenants stepping on to the ownership ladder).

Likewise, not every landlord is a Dickensian figure of evil, however inconvenient that may seem to some of the less sophisticated campaign groups: and those landlords who do go rogue get the penalties and adverse publicity they deserve, which is not always the case with anti-social tenants.  

In other words, the groups and labels created by marketing people in London’s Soho Square are not as homogeneous as some would want us to believe. And in a world of individuals, thank goodness for that.