A new generational cohort is emerging from the Millennial market segment as a result of cataclysmic events that have occurred since 2008. Interviews with college upperclassmen in the United States identified significant events influencing their values, the values arising from these events, and new values not associated with older Millennials. The most important events identified included the Great Recession, 9/11, and the election of the first African-American president. Values of Millennials were assessed in online surveys of college juniors and seniors in the United States in the fall of 2009 and 2010 and among older Millennials, aged 27-31, during the summer of 2010. The values most strongly differentiating the younger and older Millennials were "piety" and "thrift." Younger Millennials in the United States are less thrifty and more secular and sexually permissive than older Millennials. They are also less patriotic and less concerned about politics, sustainability, saving, and making mistakes in life. This suggests a splintering of the Millennials cohort as a result of the Great Recession and the potential emergence of a younger "entitlement" cohort. It also suggests further investigation of cross-national value shifts among younger Millennials, prompted by the Great Recession.

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The values of coming-of-age millennials in the United States, Sweden, and New Zealand were studied to determine if their values are similar, thus enabling marketers to stress the same values panculturally. While similarities were found on some value dimensions, many differences were noted as well. U.S. and Swedish millennials were most different from one another while New Zealand millennials were more similar to U.S. respondents than Swedes, a finding consistent with Hofstede's model of cultural values. The findings support the need to understand cohort-based values and cultural values in designing a marketing strategy targeting millennials across cultures.

We examined how visual information in an ad may interact with and influence processing of verbal information and facilitate or inhibit self‐referent judgments. Self‐referencing is viewed as a mediator between individuals' perceptions of verbal and visual stimuli in advertising and their subsequent attitudes and intentions. A 3 × 2 experimental design was used to examine the effects of three verbal copy strategies (self copy, product benefit copy, and typical user copy) and two visual image strategies (product featured or typical users featured). To enhance realism, the study was conducted in the context of testing a new experimental magazine. The verbal focus of an ad was shown to encourage varying levels of self‐referencing and differential attitudes and intentions when a product visual was featured, but not when a slice‐of‐life setting was featured. Self copy (copy written in the second person vernacular) accompanied by the product visual was the most effective strategy in encouraging self‐referencing and favorable attitudes and intentions.