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.

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

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

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.

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