By Lee Sun-ho
Statistics Korea in its early August survey defined ``the echo-boom generation as a population-spurt sub-generation born between 1977 and 1997 (aged between 15 and 35).
The number of echo-boomers makes up about one fourth of the 50 million people and is the largest-growing force in Korean society. They are the offspring of baby-boomers, born between 1955 and 1963, occupying one seventh of the population and echoing the boom of their parents’ generation. The term, echo-boomer refers to the size of the generation and its relation to the baby-boomer generation.
The echo-boom generation is the last one to remember the 20th century and the time before the fully-digital age. Some grew up with no Internet, others remember when dial-up was the big thing, before HDTV and cellphones were commonplace when CD players were a must-have item.
But they have had constant access to technology in their hiring strategy in order to incorporate updated forms of skills. In reality, the echo-boomers have become part of the larger Internet-savvy generation composed of the vast majority of Myspace members now. They truly understand the power and capabilities of new media like computers, smartphones and MP3 players.
Like their baby-boomer parents, the echo-boom generation is reshaping the campus landscape. Schools recognize the importance of offering areas for impromptu student gatherings and discussion by putting greater emphasis on teamwork and coordination so as to create a sense of community.
Likewise, their military life became much more flexible and diversified than that of baby-boomers. Echo-boomers are more likely to be skeptical of religion and ideology controversy and they are less likely to practice them than older generations.
Echo-boomers’ characters vary in Korea depending on social and economic conditions. They are generally marked by an increased use of familiarity with communications, media, and digital devices. Their upbringing was marked by an increase in a refined approach to politics, economics and glocal (global+local) multilateral relations.
Many of them are starting to reach an age where they want and need things like houses, cars and insurance. They don’t respond to marketing like earlier generations. An echo-boomer is just as likely to be playing a video game or surfing the Internet as watching TV. However, they reserve the potential capacity as the engine of national growth in every livelihood bracket.
As shown by the brilliant 2012 London Olympics achievements of Korean athletes and the worldwide Korean wave, including K-pop, the average Korean echo-boomers can control their environment, resolve their fears, obtain information quickly and easily, and have more time for themselves and less structured lives, while also developing such core values as optimism, confidence, morality, knowledge-sharing, civic duty and achievement.
The echo-boomers outnumber the baby-boomers, their parents, and have already created a new and powerful market. They have strong direct influence in all of our search marketing efforts as prosumers (a portmanteau of producers and consumers) glocally in this ubiquitous climate.
They are comfortable with changes and have grown up understanding the new digital economy, displaying a strong work ethic and direct purchasing power. More than any previous generation, they are becoming conversant with communications and fair competition, professional career and unemployment, higher education and marriage, health care and cultural function enjoyment, and every institution in our society.
We have to adjust and tailor our schemes to mass audiences and do our best to accommodate echo-boomers’ paradigms to the best forthcoming fashion for the sake of our community in the foreseeable years to come.
Our futures are virtually determined by what echo-boomers do at present. Although it is important to dream their better future, taking steps to realize their desires in a wishful but sound manners is even better.
As tomorrow’s leaders in Korea, the echo-boom generation as the next big prosumers will create a new economic boom of increased productivity, real-wage gains, rising savings, falling debt and moderate consumption.
The writer is an outside director of Samyang Tongsang Co. in Seoul. Contact him at kexim2@unitel.co.kr.