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Marketing is no longer something you do to youth, but something you do with them (mobileYouth report 2008)
Step out the ivory tower a minute, forget direct marketing or social media and take a look at the world of the young consumer and, importantly, what works. Take a look at what youth are actually saying about your brand and marketing.
For starters, campaigns are effective but only in the short term. Ask yourself, when your marketing dollars stop what happens to your customer engagement? If that also drops, then you have an expensive and highly intensive marketing strategy that will return results only as long as you keep priming the pump.
Engaging youth is no longer about short term spiking (ie campaigns), but a focus on long term creation.
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Graham Brown
Think long term, think organic, think partnership; here are the 3 most overlooked marketing strategies for successfully engaging young consumers because they don’t necessarily dwell on technology, media planners or the next great thing but do the common things uncommonly well – make youth feel significant, make them feel they belong – welcome to partnership marketing.
Yes, believe it or not but “good customer service” consistently features near or at the top when youth are asked what they want from their operator (source mobileYouth report 2005-2008). Furthermore, it’s the difference between youth churning from one network operator to the next as customer service forms the foundations of that other great tenet of youth marketing: trust.
Consider O2‘s move to replace product managers with customer service managers, a change that improved its long term customer retention rate and reduce churn. No coincidence.
Customer service means giving young consumers access to the machine, not through an “e-ticket” system which merely serves to enrage them but human contact.
Virgin Mobile is now pushing customer service as a key selling point for young consumers
Virgin Mobile commericial demonstrating customer service
2) Value Communication
Youth increasingly seek out companies and brands that display a set of core values similar to their own world view. When GAP were rustled for their tenuous connections with child labour in India, their sales plummeted. Similarly, Starbucks is on the defensive with its fair trade policy and now actively fighting back with a “follow the bean” campaign to demonstrate ethical core values at the heart of the organization.
Orange RockCorps, Virgin Mobile’s Homeless Youth reality TV and Vodafone Receiver are 3 examples of mobile companies slowly but surely awakening to the fact that VALUES SELL and are highly effective marketing strategies.
Virgin Mobile’s Homeless Youth TV (HYTV) taking a swipe at the whimsical nature of reality and gameshow TV – are youth failing to buy into TV’s values?
Exclusive Premiere: Homeless Youth TV – Time For A Reality Check
Orange RockCorps – “You can’t buy a ticket, you can’t win a ticket – you have to earn a ticket!”
So what is Orange RockCorps?
3) Event Creation
If you want to engage youth, you need to become part of their universe. The days when you could simply sponsor a music festival and achieve buy-in are long gone because everyone has cottoned on to that chestnut and the market has moved on.
Event creation lies at the heart of the most savvy of youth brands. Red Bull, Jones Soda, Boost Mobile and Nike are all died-in-the-wool event creators. Each is a market strategy brimming with viral potential and long term touchpoints that expose short term campaigns for what they are – small caffeinated spikes in attention that soon die off.
“We’re rebuilding” – one skater on the Boost Mobile / RockCorps event in Venice, CA
Boost Mobile: Rock Corps Busta Rhymes, Terry Kennedy
Events not only create the peer group stars of tomorrow (think Nike & Air Jordan) but they also offer bags of Social Utility to youth and help companies build tightly defined market beachheads.
Here’s one of the innovative ways Red Bull does it – rather than sponsor a youth music festival, they create their own academy – a legacy that lasts… here is the academy in Israel
Red Bull Music Academy 2008 Workshop Session Tel Aviv Israel
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