Different world — targeting today's technology-savvy youth market, by Merlin Stone

The book reveals not only how much these younger customers spend, but also how much they influence their parents in some way; they affect the choice in 67% of parental brand purchases. It also documents the incredible amount of time they spend in front of a screen and their familiarity with new media: 50% go online daily while 83% of texts are sent by 13-19 year-olds. It describes how these technologies have created new communi­ties, a world where millions view time spent in the real world as a necessary evil to earn time and money for the virtual world. Most importantly for us, young people have made up in speed of communication what they have lost in creativity. They learn about brands and what their friends think of them faster than they ever did before.

Marketing gap
BrandChild also describes how young people routinely take on different identities to play games, often to disguise their real one; 59% of kids are very concerned about privacy — higher than the adult rate. Solo text-based games have shifted to community-driven, media-rich Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) which companies like Microsoft, with its Xbox Active initiative, are already tapping into. All this confirms how right Tim Berners-Lees, inventor of the World Wide Web, was when he said that, "the web is more of a social cre­ation than a technical one".

The conclusion we have reached is that the gap between marketing as we know it and what is needed to succeed in the youth market is widening. While teens may aspire to be young adults, this does not mean that they want to buy what adults buy. Their buying is strongly influenced by peer group pressure and internally defined values rather than flash gadgets such as WAP.

Marketing propositions
Marketers need to focus on how young people are creating and using content to play out their rituals and express their values. The propositions we formu­late, the media we use, the information exchanges that we hope will lead to these propositions being accepted, must be part of the world of youth, rather than being poorly disguised versions of those that we use in the adult world.

For example, many young people say that they have nowhere to hang out, as public spaces in the real world are carved up and given over to private inter­ests. Security and privacy are not guaranteed. So they create an online world, which allows them to create and sustain short or long-term relationships in chat sites, role-playing games or 3D virtual cities. Marketers are realising that locating in, investing in and building tween and teen communities does more for product uptake than expensive launches. Rather than the marketers, tweens and teens need to do the talking and be the messengers.

"Marketers need to focus on how young people
are creating and using content to play out
their rituals and express their values"

The proposition, from product through to pay­ment, needs to play a credible part in a different world. It may need to be offered in a different (virtual) place, one that allows communities to dis­cuss it just as they would in a real place.

Environmental concerns
In Ian Spero's world, young people from all over the world sit down to watch a movie together, in their own rooms, chatting about it as the movie plays, reacting together to commercials and sponsorship, perhaps even talking to the sponsors, asking which games they're appearing in, checking their environmental credentials (amazingly important according to the research), asking for mobile coupons and where they can be redeemed, and telling them whether they have passed the youth test.

Is this all real? Well, BrandChild says it's starting to happen and representatives of leading brands who came to a seminar we ran in February confirmed it. If you feel that all this is passing you by, it's probably because you're simply too old.

Merlin

April 2003