Meet the Teenage Pirates. They are one of the three key segments of Generation O that mobile brands need to know about.
Teenage Pirates are high school students between the ages of 15 and 17 who seek social currency through mastery of skills i.e. recognition among peers as skilled in using a specific tool. They pick tools they can hack to discover new uses, gain control of their social lives or create their own social space.
Teenage Pirates – Hacking mobile phones to optimize their social lives
Source mobileYouth report 2012
What do mobile companies – both handset manufacturers and operators – need to know about Teenage Pirates for 2012? We’ve been researching youth mobile culture since 2001 and we believe that Teenage Pirates will play a key role in which brands will emerge as industry leaders in the next 10 years.
Here are key Teenage Pirate traits and trends that mobile brands need to pay attention to:
- Positive Deviance: Have you been scratching your head about co-creation and how can you involve youth in creating your next big product? Teenage Pirates are already out there creating new products for the market. They call it hacking but do not bear any malicious intentions towards the brand or the products. All they want to do is optimize their social lives. How can your brand enable Teenage Pirates to hack products and feed your innovation team with ideas to take back to their labs?
- Inheritance of Tools: How do teenagers get their hands on smartphones? Teenage Pirates inherit Social Tools from their older siblings, family members and parents. The hand-me-down mobile phones have so far been feature phones as parents upgrade to a smartphone. However, in the next two years as parents renew their contracts, more teenagers will be receiving used smartphones handed down to them by their parents. the hand-me-down nature of the device encourages the teenager to experiment with the device as they are not tied down by warranty agreements. They are bound to discover more new uses for existing smartphone applications, the same way they found new ways to use SMS and BBM.
- Passive communication: Most teenage communication is passive in nature i.e. without a structure or a pre-defined agenda. Teenagers refer to this as ‘hanging out’ where they simply enjoy each others’ company. Adults, on the other hand, make voice calls with a set agenda in mind and hang up once the goal is met. Teenage Pirates are already using video chat services like TinyChat, Oovoo and Skype on their personal computers to create video hangouts. Find out how this will affect mobile video services.
Related articles
- The secret lives of teenagers (mobileyouth.org)
- Introducing Generation O (mobileyouth.org)
- Teens + TinyChat = Online video hangout (mobileyouthideafactory.com)
- Positive Deviance (youthmarketingacademy.com)
- Lack of fear drives young people to innovate your products (mobileyouth.org)
- Social Tool (youthmarketingacademy.com)
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