My daughter is thirteen years old. She’s smart, savvy, and wise beyond her years in many ways. She’s a tech-freak, teaching herself photo editing, photography, HTML, and more. Her Palm® Centro™ is constantly in her hand. In many ways, she and her gaggle of friends are the perfect audience for social marketing. We talk about using social tools like Twitter to reach new generations of consumers, the ‘kids today’ obsessed with MySpace and Facebook and the rest.
Imagine my surprise when I told my daughter “You should get on Twitter!”, and she responded “Please, all our parents are on Twitter”. Apparently, this makes Twitter automatically uncool. Ouch. Ah well, I’m a parent. I’m used to anything I like being automatically uncool (with the possible exception of music, movies, and TV – we seem to have a two-way dialog going on there). However, this conversation got me thinking.
My daughter is a Millennial, aka a member of Gen Y or the Net Generation. What we’re seeing, as dinosaur Gen Xers ourselves, is that our children experience the world in a vastly different way than we ever did. They don’t have artificial boundaries, or loyalty to any one technology or platform as a vehicle to connection or self-expression. If a MySpace clone emerged with better functionality (say, for my daughter, a better interface between unsigned bands and music lovers), she’d dump MySpace in a heartbeat and not give it a second thought.
It occurs to me, then, that we must broaden our understanding of social marketing if we’re going to reach this vital group of consumers. Make no mistake, my daughter and her friends have serious money to spend. Millennials account for more than $170 billion dollars of spending a year. That’s roughly five percent of all US consumer spending. As they mature, that number’s only going to rise.
We might think we’re on the cutting edge of social media, but what if we really have tunnel vision regarding the future of the movement? What works today with us and our peers is not likely to work tomorrow with my daughter and her peers. Teenager Tom says, “Yeah there’s a lot of advertising everywhere, but I don’t know… The more advertising I see, the more it kind of turns me off of buying things I think, ’cause I don’t like all that advertising being right in my face all the time. I don’t buy any of that stuff. I basically go, if somebody else has it I ask them, y’know, what they think of it or I’ll try it out myself. I don’t really listen to commercials and ads and newspapers and everything.”
These kids grew up with Tivo®. My daughter experiences physical pain (or so one might think from her moaning and groaning) when she can’t fast forward through commercials. If you try to sell her, you’ve lost her, because guess what? You’re trying too hard. And trying too hard is…you guessed it. Uncool.
Millennials listen to each other. Microblogs, corporate blogs, anything with the tinge of ‘The Man’ to it will automatically turn them off. Of all the elements of social marketing available to us, ratings and reviews are the ones most likely to work in this growing demographic. What if the aforementioned Tom wanted to spend his Christmas Best Buy® gift card on a Bluetooth® gaming headset for his PC, but none of his friends had such a thing? He’d head to the Best Buy Web site and look for ratings and reviews. But not just any reviews – he’d look for reviews that actually address the things that matter to him, and that he felt were written by peers. The concerns of a middle-aged Gen Xer who is enthused about using his headset to talk to his colleague in Finland on Skype™ would not resonate in the slightest, and might even provoke the dreaded teenage eyeroll.
The thing to remember about marketing to Millennials is that while they’re more connected than any other generation in history, they’re also the most deeply cynical and suspicious. They like to get advice from each other, but they don’t trust advice from outside. Finding a way to target ratings and reviews without looking like we’re targeting ratings and reviews is the key to communicating with them. The good news is that, once you do manage to open a dialog based on trust, you’ll have their loyalty…at least until something better comes along.
Filed under: Social Networking, Word of Mouth / Viral Marketing
Excellent point of view, and for the most point, I couldn’t agree more. We need to lose this “tunnel vision” you talk about and look around us.
However, something struck me that I disagree with in Teenager Tom’s quote. He says “I don’t really listen to commercials and ads and newspapers and everything.”
He doesn’t THINK he does. But he does. The fact that his friends have an iPod stemmed from the advertising and marketing of that product. The fact that his friends have it is an ad in itself.
So we not only have to listen to what teenagers have to say to understand how to reach them, we once again have to look at the whole picture- what are they doing, how are they acting.
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