Marketing is all about storytelling because storytelling has, since the era of the spoken word and the hunter gatherers huddled around the campfire, been the most effective way of communicating meaning and change to others. So often we reduce marketing to the features, the product.
How successful would parents be if they instructed their kids to “Invest for the long term. Don’t get caught up in short term rewards”? Not very… They don’t need to because they have Three Little Pigs.
Similarly, good youth marketing today needs to make that story relevant to the consumer. Too many stories are told about irrelevant and ephemeral brands that have little real meaning in the universe of the customer.
Great youth brands today know one thing – that Attention is Your Biggest Cost. So much so that if there is no existing dialogue between the brand and the customer it doesn’t matter how much money and creative genius you throw at the solution, very little of it will stick long term.
That’s why advertising needs to change, because its impact is rarely long term. Our attention is geared as such that we only “see” what we’re focusing on. If you want evidence of this, check out this article on Neuropsychology of Youth Marketing (The Dancing Bear).
Youth attention follows their own image
If youth aren’t already focusing on your brand’s conversation, you don’t even stand a chance. So how do you do that? How do you earn that focus?
Youth Marketing needs to tell the story around the customer not the brand
Getting “in focus” means making them part of the picture. Threadless is a good example of how the brand is about them (see my video interview with the Jake Nickell here). Even large multinationals such as Unilever are asking the question – how do we involve youth in the marketing process? (See Axe examples).
Ask any good movie director or film buff and they’ll tell you that the movies that work are the ones where the audience clearly identifies with the challenges faced by and personality of the main character. It resonates. Similarly, putting your customer in the picture means making it about them.
Great brands understand marketing needs to change from the monologue to the dialogue
Making about them means involving youth wholeheartedly in the product development and marketing process such that your ultimate aim is to break down the walls between these two company “departments”. Marketing becomes product development. Product development becomes marketing.
Taken from the original Slideshare presentation “Now I can Drink Me”
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