The following is an opinion piece edited by author Graham Brown

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The fitness landscape that determines success in marketing to young consumers
is changing. 10 years ago, the TV provided the de facto advertising
channel to win the hearts and minds of this often difficult to reach
demographic. Since 2007 alone, the rise of social networking, flat rate
data plans both on mobile and internet as well as a widespread growth
in niche media content means that marketers are now increasingly
challenged when it comes to both communicating with and understanding
youth.

Technorati Tags: mobile youth, mobileyouth, youth marketing, youth trends, marketing trends, youth mobile, graham brown, luke mitchell, reach students, student marketing, brands, youth brands

But fear not, because we bring you insight from two of the youth
marketing industry’s key commentators to shed some light on what’s hot
in 2008 when it comes to trends in youth marketing.

Graham Brown author of mobileYouth and Luke Mitchell from Reach Students bring you the 7 key youth marketing trends to look out for in 2008.

#1 “Free” is a viable business model

Given
the increasingly challenging task of reaching out to young consumers,
more brands consider the “free” route (eg ad supported or
cross-selling) as a viable alternative to paid downloads.

Recent
download data from NIN and Radiohead’s respective attempts at “pay what
you like” charging models demonstrates that allowing the consumer to
decide what value should be placed on the relationship and content can
be both profitable and a shrewd PR move.

But it’s not just
music artists trying to crack the “free” nut but delving deeper we find
well established brands from RyanAir to Google to Skype making money
out of young consumers by giving away goods and services others would
traditionally have paid for.

Blyk’s
attempt to crack the mobile industry nut claims that rather than bring
to the telecoms table yet another fledgling MVNO, the startup says the
operator’s position is a response to a market need - on the one hand
young consumers are keen to have subsidized phone bills and the other
we have a line of brands queueing up to build a dialogue with young
consumers.

Youth indifference may well prove to be a brand’s
most significant cost factor so offering a service for free with the
promise of cross-selling related services may well provide the first
tentative steps in addressing that challenge.

#2 Transparency

When
things go wrong, as they inevitably do, legal eagles compete with
internal marcomms departments to issue the highest volume of memos all
in the name of Brand IP and protecting corporate interest.

Some
of the more innovative brands, however, are going long on being
transparent about their values and mistakes when communicating with
youth. Household names such as Jet Blue, GAP, Starbucks are learning
the hard way that covering up no longer works and consumers, especially
the younger ones, warm to companies that admit their human fallacies.

Consumers
are tired of being both whitewashed and stonewalled. In an era when
youth expect access and brands are willing to provide it, the company
CEO that appears on YouTube confessing they’d “screwed up” may lose a
few investor friends, but wins the long term hearts and minds of the
consumer.

After all, he is like us - human. And people buy people, not brands.

#3 Facebook fatigue

It’s
now all about 30 somethings in the world of Facebook. Youth are already
exploring new avenues more relevant to their lifestyle - such as Bebo.
Do we yet have a student specific SNS?

MySpace’s partnership
with MTV to platform young musical talent from the social network is a
PR victory in the face of a Facebook population disillusioned with
their parents and corporates hijacking the party.

Back in the
80s, youth witnessed their parents squeezing into a pair of Levi’s
501s. No longer was the “original jean” cool because it failed to
evolve its consumer relevance in as much as SNS sites seek the latest
widget to keep themselves alive.

MySpace continues to thrive despite the naysayers, Facebook however is not the youth player it once was.

#4 The rise of the moderates

You
know that student activism is finally dead when even NUS suggests a
radical reform of its own organisation. It wants to move away from
discussing minority issues and global affairs, and instead reflect the
everyday interests of its members.

Individually, most students
have a moderate and parochial political outlook these days, more
concerned with the price of their Bacardi & Coke than any ethical
questions that may come served with it. But now this swell of moderate
opinion has become a determined movement.

Look out for a new generation of young leaders, keen to show the world how pragmatic they can be.

#5 “Inner circle” brands

Once
young consumers were thought to be naïve and persuadable. Then they
were savvy, fickle and cynical to brand messages. What followed was a
stalemate where wise brands and young consumers knew each others’ hands
and knew it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. Then things got
complex.

The
brands that are winning now have been allowed into a collective inner
circle, one where they carefully manage very sophisticated and very
considered relationships. Recent research by Opinionpanel discovered a
maximum of twenty brands that students were willing to be Facebook friends with. They included Sony, H&M, Apple and Innocent.

But
there is also space in the inner circle for maverick brands who don’t
give a damn for high-level marketing approaches. In convenience foods
this year, watch as sales of plain, honest and simple Pukka Pies rise,
while youth ‘try hards’ like Pot Noodle fall.

See how brands such as Scion and Red Bull are building relevance with youth in our Great Youth Brands series.

#6 It’s cool to be a suit

In the eyes of the young, businesspeople were once the least cool people in the world. Now it’s okay to want to be a suit.

Thanks
to Dragon’s Den, The Apprentice, a second wave of internet
entrepreneurs (spiritually led by youth icon Mark Zuckerberg), media
dramatisation of financial news and ever-increasing opportunities to
make money from your bedroom computer, business is somehow sexy.

Witness
the clamour of smart twenty-somethings trying to get in to London’s
must-see gig of last term. Not “Hot Chip” at the Electric Ballroom, but
investment bankers BNP Paribas at the LSE.

#7 Youth turn off the box

The
current generation of young consumers are perhaps the first that have
had real choice in their media consumption. TV, although remaining a
significant channel of influence in their lives, is increasingly being
squeezed out by other distractions. Facebook, MySpace, WII, homework,
after-scool activities, commuting and just good old “hanging out with
friends” compete with TV for youth attention.

And it’s not just
the decreasing time spent watching TV, it’s the quality of that time.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 25% of high school students
were actively involved in another form of media (playstation, computer
etc) whilst “watching” TV. Add to that the increasing fragmentation of
media channels (MTV1, MTV2, MTVBase, MTVU etc) you find a situation
where advertisers can no longer identify clear front-runners for their
marketing spend.

About mobileYouth

(Graham
Brown) mobileYouth is a 7 year ongoing research project into how
technology such as mobile phones fits into the social universe of young
people. mobileYouth helps companies such as Vodafone and P&G
understand how to better develop and market youth products.
http://www.mobileYouth.org

About Reach Students

(Luke Mitchell) Reach Students is a digital marketing consultancy
focused on the intelligent youth audience. Recent clients include the
Cabinet Office, Cancer Research UK, Parcelforce Worldwide and the
University of Salford. It publishes case studies, resources and opinion
at http://www.reachstudents.co.uk and has been issuing its popular student marketing e-newsletter since 2002.

Areas of interest:

* What do youth want from and think of their operators?
* Youth loyalty & churn (leading to Net Promoter Score)
* Trust Measurement as impact on Profitability
* Next Generation Brands (Red Bull, Jones Soda, EA, Scion etc)

Here’s the download for my (Graham Brown) presentation to Telenor Djuice in Oslo, October 2008 at the Djuice brand summit.

Technorati Tags: telenor, djuice, youth, mobileyouth, mobile youth, mobile youth report, youth marketing, youth research, net promoter score, churn, youth loyalty, crm, red bull, jones soda, EA, scion, graham brown

Presentation

From Original Post Here

In the second of our features series looking at the 10 most common myths held about Mobile Youth.

Myth #9 - Youth Grow Up Faster These Days

Following on from our previous post about the Myth of Connectivity, it’s appropriate we address another widely held prejudice about today’s young consumers.

Perhaps the most pervasive of all myths is #9 - that “Youth Grow Up Faster These Days”. If like me you were in your 20s when you got your hands on your first mobile phone, to think that back then the prospects of owners not yet to have reached their first birthday would have been unthinkable.

Yet here we are in the 21st Century. The average age at which consumers get their first mobile phone is just under 9 years of age. With the world of the internet a mere click away, surely youth today are far more worldly, if not warey, of their environment and what marketers have to offer.

However this is where reality and observation diverge.

Youth today, if anything, grow up slower than their predecessors. In our 2007 mobileYouth research we surveyed parental attitudes towards mobile ownership by their children. Universally, parents cited “security and safety of my child” as their number one concern about parenthood. No wonder then that parents today fret over the prospect of their children walking home from school when in their generation they would have happily lept through hedgerows until dusk.

The youth of the industrial revolution were far from being protected. 120 years ago, if you were a young teenage girl in London you’d be lucky not to be working in a match factory. Not only were the
conditions unhygienic but also exploitative and dangerous. Teenage girls took to the street in 1888 to protest against 14 hour working days and the use of phosphorous in matches. One social commentator noted the plight of a particular “match girl” in question who

By working eighteen hours per day the girl could sometimes get through a
gross of boxes, but, it was plaintively added, “She could only do that
occasionally, as it made her ill.”

Social historians amongst us will remind us that youth “back then” were less protected, less smothered in their development. If anything, youth of yesteryear grew up a lot faster. Teenage marriage, workhouses and conscription were not uncommon in the 19th century.

So what does this mean for marketers today?

We tend to resign all issues related to the ineffectiveness of modern marketing campaigns aimed at youth as stemming from the ubiquitous issue of “youth growing up to fast these days” - read: youth are too clever for fall for this marketing trick. However, if anything this tends to be a widely held misnomer. Youth today are more protected than their parental forebears. If you want the reason why youth aren’t digging your marketing the answer lies in trust and relevance.

From Original Post Here

It’s easy to get lost in the quant - take a look at the numbers: the mobile youth market is worth over $250 billion. However, numbers are meaningless without the qualitative. So, following the earlier post on Youth Trends in China, here’s a short presentation on Chinese Youth vintage fashion from Youthology.

The innovative nature of young consumers lends credence to the argument that in many ways, here is your best shot at product development. When brand owners are able to give up on “owning the youth brand“, you effectively unleash this creative wave that, with the right leadership from you as the brand custodian, can only serve to benefit your marketing.

Kungfu Issue 1 China Youth Vintage Swank

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: retro vintage)

youth, china, mobile youth

From Original Post Here

We hear a lot about youth not spending like they used to on music. Change it appears has not favoured the record industry. However, one can’t deny innovation such as Radiohead’s flexible charging models and the subsequent fan response as a vindication that while the charging models may be suspect, the $250 billion mobile youth market certainly hasn’t lost their appetite for music. Following on from his earlier presentation on MTV & Youth, here’s a great presentation by MTV Asia’s Ian Stewart on Mobile, Youth and Music.

Music Matters to MTV 2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: mtv future)

From Original Post Here

In this series for our features series, I look at the 10 most common myths held about Mobile Youth. If you want to understand young consumers don’t hire a technologist - they’ll tell you why young people are or are not relevant to Web 2.0, mobile and the internet. However, what you need to be understanding is why these technologies are relevant to young people.

Technologists will view the challenge as to how youth fit into their universe and cling on to the myths accordingly creating significant wastage in product development and marketing.

As the old addage goes, if the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer - everything will resemble a nail.

So, from my experience of working in Tokyo from 1996-1998 to growing Mobile Youth since 2001 I offer you my best insights - the 10 most common myths about Mobile Youth.

Starting with #10

Myth 10. Mobile Youth are the “Connected Generation”

I find this to be the blandest statement ever made in qualitative research. Every time I read it in an industry white paper the question that often comes to my mind is “so what?”.

What exactly is this saying? Not much. It’s a very safe and middle-of-the-road approach to understanding young consumers which unfortunately offers little or no insight.

Consider, for example, the parents - are they not also a connected generation? Doesn’t almost every 30-39 year old executive and office worker live out most of their days staring at a screen? On the way to the office they stare at their blackberries, followed by 9 hours of staring at a larger screen. The more active of this demographic will squeeze in an hour at the gym where, you guessed it, they stare at a screen. Evening activity involves starting at a screen.

Almost every economically active individual today is “connected”, so the fact that it is only youth that are connected, is a myth.

What Mobile Youth really want is social interaction because they place a higher premium on tools that facilitate it than other age groups. Consider this; at what period in your life do you consistently interact with more than 50 people on a daily basis? Generally speaking, few adults do. This level of interaction is only available to those in institutionalized education - college and school. So does it not also make sense that those who interact most ahve the greater need for tools that support this interaction?

When we are brave enough to venture beyond the stale platitudes of white paper speak and understand the psychological and sociological drivers that shape young consumer behavior we also realize that “connectivity” is merely superficial gloss applied by a technologically driven industry that wants a quick, simple fix to a much more complicated question - ie., why would young consumers buy my product?

From Original Post Here

Globe Philippines targeting the mobile youth segment through their Iphone initiative.

The iPhone was launched in the Philippines August 22 to much spectacle, partly due to the big launch by telecommunications company Globe. Globe Telecom President Gerardo Ablaza, Jr. speaks to INQUIRER.net community evangelist Alex Villafania about the phone, particularly the mobile Internet function.

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globe, philippines, mobile youth, iphone, appstore

From Original Post Here

What can youth achieve without adults?

Fascinating insights from Sugata Mitra’s TED talk on youth learning in India. For those of you interested in development issues, youth and learning - this is a must. Raises some fascinating questions about education and will be a long standing testament to the power of youth.

mobile learning

From Original Post Here

New presentation from Younique in South Africa on Engaging Youth through Social Media
Engaging Youth Through Social & Mobile Media

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: marketing facebook)

younique, presentation, social media, youth

From Original Post Here

That’s the size of the mobile youth market according to mobileYouth’s latest 2008 research - the mobile youth report. Here are some sample data sets from the report available for download & sharing.

More free youth data available for download at mobileYouth (fill in the form on the home page)

Mobileyouth Data Sample

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: statistics data)