The Next Organization

Major Economic Crises that Shape East Asian Cohorts

Economic crises are important factors to consider when defining cohorts. They not only impact the current generations, but also the future ones in many different ways. However, unequal impact of the crises gives way to another way of segmenting the impacted cohorts.

In a conversation last week, a colleague of mine pointed out a major difference between his generation, who was born after 1975, and another born just a couple of years earlier in Korea. According to him, the financial crisis in Korea in 1997 was the main reason for this difference. He also mentioned the "failing generation" of Japan as the result of the economic downturns in the 1990s and early 2000s. These both are in line with the generation cohort concept that I wrote in a recent post.

I did a quick research on the issues and found out a couple of interesting points:

Defining generational cohorts for Vietnam - Need reader's comments and inputs

The normal convention in Vietnam defining 8x and 9x is only generations, which does not guarantee a clear distinction for marketing or management. Generation cohort, defined by events that were happening during the "come of age" (16 - 22 years old), is a better way of classification. This post proposes a cohort system for Vietnam, and call for comments from readers.

Back in 2004, I talked to a few friends studying MBA and social studies about building up a generational cohort system for Vietnam, something similar to one of US. Nonetheless, we didn't come up with any clear plan due to many reasons. After that, I myself did some of the work, mainly from spending's and saving's point of view for multiple Vietnamese cohorts that I identified.

A year later, the concept of 8x generation started to be widely accepted in Vietnam. Now, people started talking about the 9x generation. However, when it comes to application, generation is in most cases used interchangeably with cohort, which makes it inaccurate.

First, let's look at the definition of generational cohort and make the distinction between cohort and generation. Cohorts are defined by Charles Schewe, Geoffrey Meredith and Stephanie Noble as "groups of individuals who are born in the same period and travel through life together. They experience similar external events during their late adolescent/early adulthood years. These "defining moments" influence their values, preferences, attitudes, and buying behaviors in ways that remain with them over their lifetime." The events that was happening during the "come of age" defining the cohorts, therefore the cohort can be long or short depending on these events.

The normal convention in Vietnam defining 8x and 9x is based on generations, i.e. the decade of birth, is unreliable. On one hand, there is no special reason why year of birth may cause the difference. On the other hand, the length of 10 years does not guarantee that the difference is significant between generations, especially among years close to the decade transition.

Proposed Vietnamese Cohorts

From all of these, cohort promises a better result in segmenting age groups than generation, even though the former is still a way to build stereotype of people. Based on the major events happening in Vietnam recently, I propose the following cohorts for people born and lived in Vietnam till their early twenties: