Youth don’t wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with your mobile app or your brand on their mind - so why do we think otherwise?

Let’s face it - youth don’t care about you, your product, your latest whatever or the fact that you’re the leading, the biggest, the most innovative whoever…

Your biggest cost today is not your marketing budget or product development but youth INDIFFERENCE

So when you launch a new product, they don’t care. Once you start realizing that, you start realizing how you can use it to your advantage because there are countless technology companies out there who believe that their technology and service alone is enough to win over young consumers.

You only need to spend a week down in sunny Barcelona any given February to understand how where this is coming from.

Marketing Campaign + Youth Indifference to Your Brand = Guaranteed LT Failure

Reality Check.

Youth care only about themselves. We should know, we trained them as their parents and we were the same. In fact, since time immemorial, we have only ever cared about ourselves and what you can do for me.

So, let’s consider the brand.

Red Bull works because it seeks first to understand then be understood. (Stephen Covey’s 3rd habit of “Highly Effective People” for those that are interested). Red Bull sought to understand its people before it set upon them and it found that youth didn’t want another soda drink - they wanted something that facilitated their social existence. Red Bull not only provided that fuel (literally) but also provided events that create the social hub itself (Red Bull Air Race, extreme sports competitions etc).

So how do we measure up?

My own research shows there’s at least 30 “leading providers of” targeting the mobile Youth segment in the Americas and Europe. Youth don’t care. Let’s get with the program before we end up becoming the next Levi’s or the music industry in its entirety. It’s no wonder that young consumers are now arming themselves with the mindset and technology to blank out advertising altogether. 80% of new VCRs will have ad-skipping technology by default by 2008 (Jupiter Research). 69% of consumers were interested in technology that skipped or blocked advertising (Yankelovich 2004)

We have low expectations of our results and high expectations of youth engagement

Our industry standards are low. We expect indifference as the norm and operate in tandem with other industries that consistently score poorly in consumer satisfaction. Take the airlines for example and this quote from Jet Blue’s departing CEO Edmondson-Jones

“Indifference. Indifference directed at the passenger. It’s easy to feel that you’ve lost your dignity flying the big guys. You are a number and a boarding pass. It’s like a cattle call…. Everyone’s trying to shave three or four cents off a passenger. Passenger expectations are so low that when you help them with their baggage, it’s a real shock from what they’re used to.” He went on to add: “It’s amazing that the level of expectations for airlines in general and especially for discount entrants is so low that if you set your standards high, it’s easy to create a reputation for customer service.”

According to Informa’s “Minimising Mobile Churn Strategic Report’s exclusive Industry Survey carried out in May 2006″, 75% of operators said an acceptable level of churn would be 15% or less. 15% is just “average” in the cross-industry Loyalty Guide of 2006.

So how is it that we as an industry have arrived at the acceptance of being just “average” in young consumer eyes?

We fail to understand because we seek first to impress our own agenda on them (3G, LBS, MMS, Web 2.0) before we understand them. The subsequent lack of long term interest in their uptake is dismissed as being the product of typically “fickle” youth rather than poorly executed marketing campaigns. Fact is they don’t care about 3G, “killer apps” or “web2.0″ in the first place.

Realizing the source is often half the solution itself and here we have it -

Young consumers don’t care that you know unless they first know that you care

So ask yourself - How are we communicating to our young consumers that we care? How are we actively involved in first creating something for them before we seek to receive their trust? To what extent is our marketing and product story about them as opposed to us?

Tags | churn, dialogue, jet blue, red bull, seek first to understand, stephen covey