The 10 Changes a CEO needs to make to win young consumers

#3 Change Your Language

Stephen Covey, author of “the 7 habits of highly effective people” said “The way we see the problem is the problem”.

In the context of marketing to youth this statement reveals many aspects of our industry taken for granted.

How can the marketing of technology truly claim to understand the nature of their consumers when the lens through which they view the consumer is fundamentally distorted? I am referring here to the language we choose to use to describe our marketing challenges.

For example, only drug dealers and the technology industry refer to their consumers as “users“. “Mere semantics” you may say. But, consider for a moment the impact of semantics in our internal company interaction, our “received wisdom” and our own belief systems about our consumers.

When we label someone a “user” we also infer a lack of decision making capability - the inference being that they merely “use” the service as opposed to actively exercising choice over the services they consume. Tesco, Nike, Starbucks, Red Bull, Scion, Coke and Jet Blue do not have “users”.

Language shapes strategy. A company may talk up the need for being “customer centric” but as long as it continues to refer to the very customer as “users” in all its internal memos, literature and conference presentations it is merely paying lipservice to idea. The core DNA of the company remains unchanged.

Similarly, language shapes how we view our industry and, importantly, our unique role within that industry. If we talk of a “value chain” as we so often do at industry conferences we imply a serial chain of relationships stretching from the product development across to the “end user”. Note: The END user - the consumer who only features at the “end” of our considerations.

“Value chains” represent the legacy of an industrial era that has long been surpassed by the need for a new lens of interpretation. No longer can we simply produce the goods and shunt them along the value chain through the modern era equivalent of warehouses onto the market in the hope that, through lack of real choice and information, the “user” is constrained to purchase.

Toyota and Tesco both know that the mental construct of “chain” is not only irrelevant but also uncompetitive in their industries. GM’s “Value Chain” approach to its suppliers created a lens through which the company viewed the dealers as their customers. Why? Because the chain inferred the most important relationship in the industry was their immediate neighbour in the chain. Both Toyota and Tesco have long implemented an inclusive “value network” approach to their consumers - start with the consumer and build out the supplier ecosystem around adding value to their needs.

Marketing to young consumers requires exercising the discipline to change.

From CEOs to marketing managers, strategic initiatives without the necessary fundamental internal structures conducive to long term change are wasteful and demotivating. When the CEO of a leading mobile operator stands to address the 3GSM crowd in Barcelona claiming a 2 year strategy to “win the hearts of minds of young consumers”, your interest in naturally piqued by the vision. That is until, however, he follows up with a claims that they truly “understand end user needs”…