Millennial Competitive Advantage

Nowadays, companies that want to gain competitive advantage from other organisations are more likely to focus on millennials’ wants and demands. Gaining competitive advantage is not an easy task when it comes to attracting millennial stakeholders.
Researchers Neil Howe and William Strauss define Millennials as "the next great generation," and "as those born in 1982 and approximately the 20 years thereafter."(Strauss, W., & Howe, N.;1997). Millennials’ social values are different from prior generations as they are more concerned about environmental issues. Most of the millennial generation are mature and entering the workforce, consuming products and investing on their own. In order to remain competitive, companies will need to adapt to appeal

He claims that firms concentrate too much on external threats and opportunities, when in fact, they should put equal emphasis on internal strength and weaknesses. He studied the resources and capabilities of different firms and came up with four characteristics that can be used to determine if a resource is a source of competitive advantage or not: Value, Rareness, Imitability and Organization. Essentially, if a firm has a valuable resource, but it is not rare or difficult to imitate, the firm has competitive parity. However, if that resource is rare, the firm will gain a competitive advantage. They will get to keep this advantage longer if the resource is difficult to replicate and if the firm is organised

As previously mentioned, when a millennial decides to buy a product or service, they are more likely to choose the brand that they know are making the right decisions to protect the environment. For this reason, it valuable to market a company’s eco-innovations. In turn, this increases sales and revenues for companies.
Adidas recently announced that it would be creating a brand-new line of shoes made from recycled plastic captured in oceans. The company plans to produce around 1 million pairs of shoes using this plastic by the end of 2017. For this project, they teamed up with Parley, an organization whose goal is to raise awareness about the ocean pollution problem (Engadget, 2016). Essentially, Adidas used Parley’s already wide base of followers to directly target these consumers, increase social capital and increase their sales revenues which makes a valuable partnership.