The Echo Boomers are addicted to ever-evolving technology that changes every two years, and often even more frequently. So how do you develop space targeted toward this generation when your project must stand for 30 years?
Twenty years ago I was a project manager building a plant for Nokia where it would manufacture its state-of-the-art mobile phones. It took 12 months to construct the plant, and the products built there had an 18- to 24-month shelf life. By the time the facility was completed, most of the phones being manufactured there had not even been invented when I began working on the project.
With this in mind, how do you know what kind of building to construct when the product it is intended to serve has not yet been invented? To solve this dilemma for Nokia, we started by taking a deeper look at the fundamental similarities of the products and their trending changes. We built the facility as a shell, which had the capacity and the flexibility to adapt quickly and easily to these fundamentals.
So, what are the basic fundamentals of the Echo Boomer? What are their common denominators? What are the deeply seated roots of their cultural make-up and desires? And what tree of iterations will they take?
The single most fundamental denominator they all share is their reliance and addiction to their iPods, iPhones, iPads, and I-don’t-know what is next’s. Technology, to this generation, is not a toy as most Baby Boomers frequently characterize it to be, but as important in their relationships to each other and the world that they live in as the car was to the Baby Boomer.
The two-car-garage family home was a fundamental building block to the post World War II American Expansion across suburban America, just as the integration of communication and information technology into everyday sticks and bricks will be a fundamental building block of all successful developments over the next 20 years.
Michael Ablon is principal of PegasusAblon, a commercial real estate development, investment and management company. Contact him at [email protected]. Photos courtesy of Apple and Rogers O’Brien Construction.
