mobileYouth®

• Are you getting your insights from the headquarters or the streets?
• Are your people spending more time in the office or out there talking to the people who make a difference – the customers?

“I believe focus groups are junk. They only justify what you want to believe is true. We go in [to talk to kids] with no agenda. You’re so much more successful if you don’t fall in love with your own ideas.” Jones Soda Founder and ex-CEO Van Stolk

I’ve spent 7 years researching mobile youth and I continued to be amazed how little contact the decision makers have with the people who keep them in a job preferring to hide behind market research, industry trade press and conference presentations.

It’s no longer good enough to simply segment your market, aim for a % share and hope for the best; you need to get out of the ivory tower and start immersing your company in the universe of youth. That’s why great youth brands such as Red Bull, Jones Soda, Scion, Boost Mobile, Threadless and Apple can grow their brands because their investing a significant % of their executives’ time not in focus groups or insight “labs” but in direct face-to-face contact with their consumers.

Ethnographic research is the next frontier of youth insight. For too long we have relied on statistics as our crutch to make ill informed decisions about what youth want – statistics have a place but they are not the vision, they are merely the product. We have spent a generationd disempowering marketing and product managers by forcing decisions to be rationalized through statistical segmentation as opposed to giving them confidence in their decisions derived from direct contact with their customers.

So, here are some of our latest ethnographic findings on the web.

* Gathering & Analyzing Artist & Fan Data (Hypebot)
* Dance like it’s 2009 (Cowfish)
* Industrial or Social – What type of youth marketer are you? (Mobileyouth)
* Why do people use Twitter? (We are Social)
* PART 1: 50 Youth Marketing Trends for 2009 (Slidshare)
* Youth Interviews 2 (CultureLab)
* Burger King’s Whopper Virgins (Buzz & Viral Marketing Agency)
* The New York Times Immersion (Buzz & Viral Marketing Agency)
* ad agencies-come out from your buildings and meet culture (Influx Insights Weblog)
* Listen to Consumers, Not Marketing Gurus (Branding Strategy Insider)
* World’s first locative documentary for mobile looks at youth culture in Soweto (Vincent Maher)
* Mobile Warriors: Costa Rican Youth, Mobile Phones and Social Change (Technorati)
* Millennials on the street: Rochester (Changing America Blog)
* Focus Groups vs Communities of Purpose (Faster Future)

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