Josh Dhaliwal from mobileYouth on BBC breakfast

View the video on Blinx/BBC website

Technorati Tags: mobile life report, youth handwriting, youth writing, josh dhaliwal, bbc

Youth Marketing is all about something you do with not to youth.” Graham Brown (mobileYouth 2008 Report)

Following my earlier riff about trends in the marketing of Great Youth Brands (last time was Red Bull), I’d like to talk about one of my favourites.

This is the key question - how does a mass market “everything to everybody” brand build relevance with a specific segment - such as Youth?

Consider this challenge facing the largest and most profitable automotive manufacturer in the world - Toyota.

Toyota cannot roll out customized fat pipe blinged rims low riding coupes for the mass market because their core value of reliability is also one of a generic appeal - they will alienate your grandmother and the school teacher.

So this is how Toyota does it - meet Scion - the Toyota sub-brand that no one knows is actually Toyota (unless you study the marque a little harder).

Check the video - this is real ownership and consumer generated content in action, this is consumer ownership of the brand - creating rather than sponsoring events, local Scikotics, magazines etc.

Common sense dictates that if a brand gets it wrong, it’s time for damage limitation with the marcomms department leading the charge.

That’s how ordinary brands deal with extraordinary issues - in average ways producing very average results.

However, I’d like to focus on how great youth brands are breaking the mold and doing something out of the ordinary.

Youth marketing is always redefining the parameters of what is acceptable. Bright individuals will always push the envelope however there will always be a marcomms department to keep them in check. That was one of the themes of my recent presentation to Vodafone on Youth, Loyalty and Trust and follows on from the Great Youth Brands Series on MobileYouth featuring Red Bull, Jones Soda and Toyota Scion.

Perhaps the best example of Uncommon Sense to date is how EA dealt with the apparent glitch in the latest release of Tiger Woods 08 that including the “Jesus Shot” - where Tiger could walk on water. Obvious mistake. Not just an obvious mistake, but a well known one - one youtube pundit (Levinator 25) made it public amassing over 600,000 views.

Embarrassment for EA? Yes, if it was handled using Common Sense.

However, check this out for sheer marketing brilliance

Tiger Woods 09 - Walk on Water

This is the result of individuals within an organization taking risky decisions to produce extaordinary results that substantially impact the brand in a positive way - that’s what I call Uncommon Sense. That’s the result of bypassing marcomms and challenging the notion of “that’s how it’s always been done”.

Ask yourself, would [#%0#2]youth[/#%0#2] react positively or negatively to this communication from EA then compare to what an average brand would do - ie a cover-up.

by Graham Brown

Vodafone, like most mobile operators, faces the ongoing challenge of being relevant to the next generation of its customers (youth) while at the same time not losing its broad appeal. It couldn’t re-invent itself as another Blyk or Boost Mobile (nor would it want to) but at the same time, as with the current problem facing the BBC and the recorded music industry the beginnings of a disconnect with young consumers may not be felt today but represents the manifestation of a long term and, importantly, irreversible disease.

Some of the points I discussed in my presentation to Vodafone about the MobileYouth Report include:

* How to build trust through relevance by drawing down on the insight from how brands such as Toyota (through Scion) have already achieved this. Also how brands can use simple metrics such as net promoter score and customer lifetime value to measure progress.
* How to be a remarkable [#%0#2]youth[/#%0#2] brand (see Jones Soda)
* How to communicate directly with [#%0#3]youth[/#%0#3] through their own channels (eg using Youtube rather than mass media and press releases (in this example we look at EA and the recent Tiger Woods “Jesus Shot” fiasco - which is also very funny).

Presented by Graham Brown author mobileYouth.org

Last time we talked about youth marketing with the review of Meatball Sundae. Today, I want to look at Mobile Youth Culture.

Mobile Youth Culture is often difficult to understand, especially when we spend so much of our time in the office and not the street. So, here’s a new post that may provide some insight by Graham Brown entitled Take your insights from the street not the lab: mobileYouth.org’s 7 laws of youth marketing covering the validity of using primary research such as focus groups in researching mobile [#%0#2]youth[/#%0#2] culture.

Consumer insights commissioning meaningless focus group primary research that confirms what they already know, e.g. “Would you pay £5 a month to download these ringtones?” Like Nike, Red Bull, Jones Soda, Jet Blue and the rest - get out on the street and start talking to your customers.

I thought about this for a while and was particularly prompted when I saw some new research out about the culture of gamers or other youth research insights from Motorola, which again like most research is heavy on the primary [#%1#2]research[/#%1#2]. Wouldn’t it be great to get out there and start videoing these people and getting some qualitative answers like mobileyouth’s own on-the-street videos or even participating in the universe of students such as our review of JuicyCampus earlier or insights such as those on Black Hipsters.

Technorati Tags: youth research, youth report, mobile youth, mobile youth culture survey, primary research, youth data, youth statistics

I’m a big fan of Seth Godin, you probably know already (I’ve already blogged down the line about The Dip). I borrowed one of his riffs earlier when I blogged about Sliced Bread and why we need to challenge the received wisdom. Godin was the first author to switch me on to the idea of the Purple Cow. For our business, our research and our clients it gave weight to the need to rewrite the rules and have confidence to enjoy a dose of Uncommon Sense.

Meatball Sundae continues where he left off Purple Cow, encouraging us all to avoid possibly the biggest marketing pitfall out there - adopting new technologies to provide the icing on the old fashioned marketing cake. Lipstick on a pig… as some politicians would say.

So much of old fashioned marketing is broken, metrics being one of them. In this video I provide my ideas about what marketing metrics technology companies should be using particularly when engaging younger consumers. Included are lifetime value, churn and net promoter score.

Just talking about Web2.0 will not make any difference. As Jack Welch says “What you measure gets done”.

If you want to pan for gold, pan upstream ie if you want change you need to change the source - this has been the theme of my recent presentations to Vodafone and Telenor. If we continue to only measure short term metrics such as ARPU, awareness and market share no matter what we do, we will continue to replicate the same results.

Now is the time to include other metrics alongside those mentioned to help marketing reconnect with consumers.

Technorati Tags: meatball sundae, seth godin, graham brown, the dip, uncommon sense, vodafone, telenor, mobileyouth, youth marketing, arpu, net promoter score

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

Summary of my Understanding Mobile Youth Workshop @ The Prepaid Mobile Summit IIR 22-25 September 2008 in Prague.

Note contains video not available on Powerpoint. MobileYouthNet to view on the street videos in full.

powerpoint, presentation, youth, marketing, download

In their own words

“This is the place to spill the juice about all the crazy stuff going on at your campus. It's totally anonymous - no registration, login, or email verification required.”

Why it might be a killer

In the Perez Hilton era, this site lets regular folks gossip about their peers. This should catch on quick amongst the university crowd.

Some questions

Is this even legal? Doesn’t this facilitate the bulling that ends up with kids shooting up their peers in school?

What it does

Campus gossip has been around since the first university was established. With Juicycampus.com, the good old campus gossip meets the internet and the results are highly entertaining. On the site, you’ll find gossip from 250 campuses around the United States. All pieces of gossip are completely anonymous. This adds to the fun, but whoever that piece of gossip is about will certainly not like it. There are over 40 thousand posts on the site, and they all have something to reveal about someone in campus. If you’re thinking of dating someone you met in one of your classes, you should search for them on this to find out possible gossip about them. If you overlook the obvious privacy and defamation breaches that this site exploits, you have something that could change the way college gossip is spread. Let’s hope they don’t shut this down before it gets really popular.

Link: http://www.juicycampus.com
Our Review: http://www.killerstartups.com/User-Gen-Content/juicycampus-com-campus-gossip-online

 

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