It’s 8am.
I’m standing outside a faceless brick warehouse on the North side of a Chicago suburb in the freezing April rain. Still wrestling with the yoke of jetlag from 3 hops through London, New York and Toronto my brain, in an attempt to call it off and spend the morning in a warm, fuzzy hotel room bed, seeds the doubts; what am I doing here?
I’m on the first leg of a journey that lasts 30,000 miles and 4 weeks. The wider journey itself, however, has lasted 8 years – maybe more because this has been an endless personal quest to seek out modern day marketing heroes and heroines.
As TS Eliot once wrote “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
And in the same way, my journey into youth marketing has been very much about learning from these modern day mavericks and trying to understand the world through the eyes of youth by shedding the preconceptions of the adult world.
As a teen, for example, my world was all about girls, games and getting drunk. Yet, despite these “passions” I would work hard at faking disinterest and generally feigning disinterest in anything that could be construed as remotely interesting.
Such is the paradox of youth and no research will ever change that.
Of this little has changed. What has changed is our relationship with media. I lived in a world where everything took 28 days for delivery and Top of the Pops on BBC1. Today’s youth no longer are expected to pay a premium just because something’s in stock and reformatted content on Youtube is about as near as they get to BBC1 these days.
Where I’d stay glued to a static ridden broadcast of the Top40 on Sunday afternoon with anticipation, my modern counterparts will no longer look to Radio DJs and TV to shape and inform their opinion.
What hasn’t changed is youth despite our convictions that we’re dealing with a different animal, a different species. “Gen C, Gen Y, Digital Natives” – whatever you want to call them – they’re still interested in Tara from the year above, wearing the same Nikes as their peers and bunking off Double Chemistry on Wednesday morning.
We lose touch with these basic truths when we start sniffing our own glue; we start believing that the products we slave over day in day out are actually the answer to their life’s daily challenges.
The cold and gray backstreets of Chicago are a world away from where I am today – the sunny foothills of Johannesburg South Africa upon which is nestled the Microsoft campus.
In came in search of some palpable evidence of the brilliance of the maverick rule breakers that created this software empire yet left with insight into why, to paraphrase the historian Toynbee, nothing fails like success.
To find out why tech spends billions on products that don’t fly, marketing that doesn’t work and advertising that turns youth off don’t look in the prospectus but in the washroom.
I was due on stage to address an audience of marketers, brand managers and government agencies that had gathered for the event in 15 minutes. But I was finding myself distracted by this new toy; you rip off the paper towel and it automatically serves you another perfect 15 cm. If you try to pull out too much, the machine whirrs dilligently and compensates you for your overzealous activity by measuring almost another perfect 15cm.
No doubt, the electronic automated towel vendor had the technology to excite the facilities manager. And, given the budget why, not? But, the problem wasn’t that washroom visitors were having difficulty in dispensing towels, the problem was that below the machine the basket that collected the towels was overflowing and paper tissue lay scattered on the floor.
When it comes to engaging young consumers there are products which MS has got right; MSN and Xbox Live for example. But, then there are countless could-have-beens from Hotmail to Live Spaces to the Zune – examples of product marketing full of platitudes and devoid of any sense of imbued purpose.
It’s not the facilities manager’s fault. He was just “doing his job”. The facilities manager is no maverick visionary and one could question whether you’d want the guy who buys the lightbulbs to express his radical creativity within the remit.
When it comes to marketing and product development, however, there is no room for excuses. From Intel to Vodafone to Nokia to MTV there is a product manager buying an electronic towel dispenser and a marketing manager chomping at the bit to wow youth with it in her new ad campaign.
Why? Because “youth are grown up digital”, because “analysts predict mobile advertising will be worth $20bn in 5 years”, because “focus group research highlights 80% of youth would be ‘interested’ in this service”.
Because from every corner there is an expert telling us that the very experience we had in our youth was wrong; you didn’t want to be treated with respect, you wanted a new way for us to tell you about our brand, you didn’t want someone human to listen to your complaint, you wanted to be our friend on Facebook.
Technology is just a promise. When the tail wags the dog it becomes the solution. When advertisers realize their traditional avenues to youth attention are increasingly stymied by various technological and psychological filters, a move to mobile or Facebook is merely a promise that the issue can be solved, not the solution itself. It’s a promise that we’ll make this relevant to you; we’ll stop interrupting you, stop treating you like an idiot and stop telling you we think we know what you want.
When Dell launched Ideastorm to incorporate consumer innovation into its development it was a promise that Dell would take the customer’s opinions seriously and create more relevant products. Yet, when Ideastorm struggled to deliver the innovative edge and relevance that consumers wanted, the marketing failed.
Pepsi’s Youniverse was a promise to youth that this mega-brand would offer a one-to-one relationship – a promise that Pepsi wouldn’t treat them like another number crunched by the marketing machine. Why would youth want to join a Facebook built especially for Pepsi?
And it’s not just large brands like Pepsi and Dell – it’s countless companies that promise to put youth in the story but fail in the delivery because somewhere an executive is buying an electronic towel dispenser.
As the electronic towels roll out, it’s new media but business as usual. It’s irrelevant interruption but across new expansive formats with infinite reach. It’s yet another form of the ubiquitous feedback form stuffed into a meaningless excel spreadsheet but this time it has a Social Media bent.
It doesn’t have to be like that.
There are numerous examples of heroes and heroines who, through either naivety, passion, pigheaded nature or an inability not to listen to “the voices” who have inspired youth not just to buy their products but to also do something special, get involved.
And this is where my latest adventure started, not on the sunny air-conditioned outreaches on the foothills of South Africa but a world away in a Chicago warehouse as I was 2 weeks ago straining to wipe off the rain from a small sign on the door to read (in tiny letters) “Skinny Corp”.
I’d heard of this company and became intrigued by their maverick attitude to business; here was a company rewriting the rule book. Despite a lack of formal business training they were projected onto the Business school celebrity speaker circuit.
I rang the buzzer. It’s 8am and 10 minutes out the taxi I’m freezing.
What I experienced next confirmed there are heroes out there. But these heroes don’t wear capes or don the mantle of business gurus – they beaver away quietly in communities you’ve never heard of yet. They slowly emerge from under the radar to multi-million dollar companies with passionate communities and hordes of followers.
And why haven’t you heard of them yet? Because they’re a square peg in the round hole of the creative advertising agencies. Because their story isn’t about them and how great their brand is, it’s about the customer.
Step into their world…
- This is work in progress from my new book Now I Can Drink Me -
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