Actually it's the other way around. Gen Xers tend to react negatively to the hard sell. We grew up in an era when advertisements had to be plainly announced, TV and radio stations had to offer airtime to opposing viewpoints, and corporate financing of political campaigns were not permitted.
There is an enormous generation gap that can be seen when it comes to embracing/rejecting promotional activity. In general we want to use self-promotional techniques that we would respond well to ourselves. However, if we want to network successfully we need to tailor our marketing to the recipients.
Boomers respond best to promotion in properly allocated venues for advertising - ad breaks in TV shows - but the promotions must demonstrate proof of worth.
Gen X wants subtlety - think product placement - and responds best to subtle introduction of brand awareness. They are absolutely turned off by blatant advertisement and are the most likely to use anonymous user handles online and adblocking software to protect their privacy. Xers concept of marketing was affected by the idea that propaganda was a tool of Big Brother & the Soviet regime. Think of the "1984" Apple commercial to get an idea of how Gen X likes their advertising, and how their concepts of commerce were formed. The web for them when they were kids was a web of free communication and innovation, anonymous and cross-borders.
Millennials grew up with TV shows that were created entirely to sell products, from top to bottom. (Think Pokemon, Power Rangers, My Little Pony.) They carry devices that are pocket shopping malls, with features a secondary concern. They grew up in a world where marketing is omnipresent and communication is handled through advertising sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Everything is self-promotional because that's what they see all around them. Their internet is now and has always been a consumerist tool, meant to sell things, with communication backburnered and innovation restricted to high-ROI areas.
I'm currently developing a business that targets millennials. I am having to engage in networking and marketing practices that I personally find really distasteful, but my target generation really appreciates. It's an ongoing morass of likes and shares and retweets and cheerleading. However, as my company's business model progresses I will also have to target the *parents* of those millennials, which means I will also have to develop an extreme hard sell approach that will also make me uncomfortable.
Jmenass, you mentioned that it was the business world that brought this up with you, and that the theater world hadn't made it seem a significant need. I think we also need to remember that opportunities for exposure to others are considerably scarcer in corporate life. Theater people tend to have cast parties and move between social groups every few months. Their assorted creative interests will naturally bring them into contact with an enormous number of people. Attending shows and reading playbills will keep us in each others minds. Our business is performance. We're always putting ourselves in front of new people.
For a corporate person, it's very common that you will go for 12 months with one company party at Christmas, and other than that you'll never see or interact with anyone outside of your department (unless you're in sales). Corporate folk need contrived excuses to go and "network".
If you were working in an arts management corporate setting, you got a double whammy of "OMG we need to network" because of the totally whacko nature of performing arts fundraising. You've got corporate people trying to raise money from other corporate people who expect to be courted by theatre companies with, well, theatre. Everything becomes an "event" and networking becomes a tracked metric because that's what marketing people do. It's their job. How many people have you touched today? How many referrals can you get? How many eyeballs saw this promotion? How did they respond to the red banner vs blue? Their concerns are not your concerns. If you don't bring the product, they don't have a job.
Yes there's things we can learn from big business but I think theatre folk need to bear in mind that we're dealing with other theatre folk in our networking. Most of us made a deliberate choice to avoid corporate life so we could get away from all that nonsense.
