Today I read yet another article on how to market to Millennials (born from the early 1980s to early 2000s). This one went on to compare some similarities between Millennials and Baby Boomers.

The funny thing about the entire premise is that it completely flies in the face of one of the most talked about aspects of marketing today – personalization.

We’re all gathering as much data as we can on every individual in America. Companies are going further by collecting and compiling data on everything a user does in that company’s ecosystem.

With that data, companies are targeting all forms of digital communication to try and guess what a customer might buy next based on what they’ve already purchased.

So given all that user-level data, why are we still talking about individuals like they can be generalized at a fairly arbitrary generational level?