by Graham Brown
Part of the feature series: The 7 Laws of Youth Marketing by Graham Brown
<Back to What makes a great Youth Brand?
1) Empower both employees and customers to own the brand.
Create a culture where marcomms doesn’t strangle the brand. Empower localized decision making and remove the fear of making mistakes that will result in employee sanctions.
Marcomms can kill many a fledgling plan for employee blogging, “open house branding” and other Sundae toppings by either playing the brand ownership card.
Law #1 may touch a raw nerve with marketing execs, especially those with a legal leaning, however we can’t spare everyone’s sensitivities here. As one pundit recently said give youth a place to say exactly what they want and “present the freaking facts“. Transparency and marcomms are still uncomfortable bedfellows.
Courting ownership means courting consumer advocacy whether offline or the growing numbers of budding youth blogger authors (who Ypulse points out have been around for longer than we realize – example) and participation which always pays back in the long term.And this isn’t the prerogative of the funky Web2.0 hordes, even American Express can do it.
As Pete Blackshaw points out, marketers love conversation – except when the consumers starts it! (good read). It’s meatballs again, new media + old ideas. For example, we need to let go of owning the conversation rather than talking about “branded word of mouth“.
The need to have the open dialogue is becoming less a “nice to have” and more a necessity – in fact, it is so valuable to some brands that they have started paying consumers for their opinions.
For an insight into how fast the market is moving, just follow the increasingly competitive footwear market and how brands are trying to engage youth within the marketing process (also see CustomKicksOnline.com and RYZWear.com). In this competitive landscape, getting advocacy right means big dividends as in the case of Tom’s Shoes. Vans is already out there buildiga mobile community presence with its customers; Personalization was the beginning, now we need to give youth access to the controls.
Next > Law #2) Take your insights from the street not the lab
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