mobileYouth®

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See the full Youth Marketing presentation here

All technological evolution needs to happen within the existing parameters of experience.

The biggest mistake technologists make is to expect consumers to build radically new behaviors around a product – e.g. MMS, LBS, Mobile TV. It works for the technologist because technologists are, by definition, open to most new ideas except one – that, in general, youth dont like change.

TV, for example, is a social experience.

Youth watched TV when it offered Social Currency. Investing time in watching TOTP on Thursday night meant you caught Boy George’s first live appearance and could partake in the schoolground chatter that followed the next day.

Today, however, talking about TV risks isolation – a fate worse than death for most youth – because when was the last time you had the following conversation “Did you see that programme on TV last night?”.

Mobile TV has mostly been, however, a viewing experience and sought to enhance the visual as opposed to the social benefit to the consumer. Successful technologies work within the parameters of consumer experience – enhancing existing behaviors rather than expecting customers to follow new ones.

What Mobile needs to do is focus on enhancing the social experience and literally taking TV back “out of the box”.

When Satoshi Tajiri invented the $100bn global empire that became Pokemon he didn’t seek to instill new behaviors on his target consumers. The Pokemon game was no more than a technological evolution of behaviors that young boys had been playing with for generations – trading cards, combat and the love of insects.

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