The other night, while sitting across the table from a handful of 30- (and 40-) something friends (one sporting an Atari T-shirt, one with iPod earbuds haphazardly slung over one shoulder, and another with a tattoo peeking out from under his sleeve), I couldn’t help being struck by the changing face of “grown-ups.”

By the time my folks were in their mid-30s, they had two kids, lived in the suburbs, wore suits, and went to dinner parties. They definitely weren’t boring and still held onto their flower-child values, but on the exterior they were undeniably “grown up.”

In contrast, while at this point in their lives most once-maligned “slacker” Gen Xers have all of the grown-up fixins’ (steady paychecks, mortgages, wedding bands, kids), a growing number of them rebel against stereotypical behavior that traditionally comes with such trappings.

In efforts to gain brand loyalty among this notoriously hard-to-pin-down, media-suspicious, and marketing-savvy generation, some marketers have started focusing less on Gen X’s universal charactaristics and more on characteristics of its higher-spending subgroups, such as the “Grups,” as defined by New York magazine:

This is an obituary for the generation gap. It is a story about 40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old. It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent. It’s about the hedge-fund guy in Park Slope with the chunky square glasses, brown rock T-shirt, slight paunch, expensive jeans, Puma sneakers, and shoulder-slung messenger bag, with two kids squirming over his lap like itchy chimps at the Tea Lounge on Sunday morning. It’s about the mom in the low-slung Sevens and ankle boots and vaguely Berlin-art-scene blouse with the $800 stroller and the TV-screen-size Olsen-twins sunglasses perched on her head walking through Bryant Park listening to Death Cab for Cutie on her Nano.

Have you noticed any other Gen X subgroups?
What do you think marketers should be doing to try to gain their loyalty?