Reaching GEN Y and keeping their attention is one of the greatest marketing mysteries of our generation. Young people today are very fickle and are constantly changing what they consider to be “cool” and “hip”. As a current summer camp counselor and college student, I have had the chance to experience this up, close and personal. It is quite amazing that the amount of knowledge our young people today have on current culture, products, and lifestyle. That is very important to remember when marketing to GEN Y — never take them for granted or assume they are not capable of understanding complex situations or products. GEN Y is one of the smartest, tech savvy and idealistic generations of our time. They know what they want, but they do not always know how to get there, and that is where market research, focus groups, BrainReactions brainstorms, and other tools come in handy. It is important to not just understand the wants, likes, and dislikes of GEN Y, but also who they are and where they want to be in the future. The youth of today love to discuss themselves and they want to the world to know they are here to stay. Our generation has grown up knowing mostly that as long as they dream big and work hard they can achieve and get anything they want. Now, that is a tough group to create for and sell to, but with the amount of money GEN Y controls, either their own or their parent’s, companies cannot make the mistake of not listening and understanding their concerns.

GEN Y is always searching for the next big tech item, clothes, shoes, etc. to jump unto and call their own. Youth of today love the idea of interchangeable products, such as multiple shoe designs, backpacks that do more than just hold books, and they are very primitive to the art of multi-tasking, more so than past generations. They are used to playing XBOX, doing their homework, chatting and texting w/friends, and planning their schedule for the next day better than the best of us. Due to the globalization of our culture and economy, companies cannot wait for their competition to create the next big thing — being on the cutting edge of product research and development is vital to the growth and expansion of products/services marketed towards GEN Y. There are truly no perfect ways to keep the attention of GEN Yers, but there are some techniques that can be utilized to increase outreach and interest of youth in a company’s products or services. Along with these eight techniques, I would also like to say the most important way to learn from and market to GEN Y is to simply listen to them. They want to be heard, but they do not always have an applicable outlet to have their voices, ideas, and concerns heard. Your company’s future can be bright when it comes to targeting GEN Y, but only if you show GEN Y that you are ready to open up and listen to them.

1. Utilizing Buzz Marketing/Word of Mouth Marketing: Young people are very open and vocal about a product or service they see as useful and innovative and will not hesitate a bit to tell their friends. Buzz marketing can be a commercial that a GEN Yer saw on TV/Youtube that was hilarious and it had some memorable slogan or quote, or it could be an interesting product name, or it could be totally something created in a GEN Yers mind from personal use of that product or service.

2. Creating fresh and innovative products or services: GEN Yers were born in a generation where new products/services are created everyday. Everything from iPods to clothing. GEN Yers expect unique creations that stretch their imaginations to new heights and offer the creativity of new technologies we are used to seeing and envisioning in our everyday lives. GEN Yers also expect simplicity of use and function, but at the same time something out of this world!

3. Make Our Lives Easier: GEN Yers expect products/services that make our hectic lives a little less fast and more relaxing and organized. GEN Yers are used to working, going to classes, and being super involved in school clubs & sports, all at the same time. In addition, anything created to make things more integrated is a plus. That could be a music player that has a scheduler/calendar or a cell phone that is also a picture taker and moviemaker. GEN Yers expect multi-function capabilities in almost any new product created aimed at our generation.

4. Attach Product/Service to a good cause: GEN Yers love companies that help good causes. Most young people volunteer according to recent studies and are more attracted to companies who have the same giving philosophy. When they know that by buying a pair of new shoes or clothing, part of the proceeds go to an important charity, they are more likely to purchase from that store and the opposite is true for companies who do not engage in charitable causes. GEN Yers care about helping those less fortunate and expect the same ideals from companies they spend their money on.

5. Style/Image Branding: Style and image are everything when it comes to product buying by GEN Yers. If a new product or service is not deemed cool or something they can tell their friends about the next day, then that product has lost a chance to make that very important first impact on a young person. GEN Yers can either be brand loyal or fickle, so companies must regularly ensure that the way they design and package new products fit in the realm of what GEN Yers expect. GEN Yers expect sharp, creative, and innovative styles and creations.

6. Advertise/Market Where GEN Yers Are: Most young people spend countless hours and days in front of their computer, at the mall, and in the movies. So placing ads before popular youth market films will reach the GEN Y audience very well. It is important that any ads speak the language of young people. Young people feel more comfortable seeing ads with actors that can relate to their age group. Unique and funny ads are essential for creating buzz for a new product or service and giving something young people can tell their friends about. In addition, advertising in popular youth magazines is a vital way to reach the GEN Y market. Furthermore, most GEN Yers have computers and access to the Internet, so advertising and collaborating with popular youth sites, like MTV.com, is an awesome way to reach the GEN Y market.

7. Street Teams/Peer-to-Peer Marketing: This is one of the best ways to reach GEN Yers. GEN Yers trust what their peers have to say, more than they do someone not their age. Street teams are an awesome way to rally youth around a new product or service and to get young people excited and engaged. It is important to ensure potential youth buyers trust the messenger. Young people are very smart and intelligent and can smell a fake ad or message a million miles away. Once a company loses that trust factor, it is very hard to regain that customer back. Street teams also are a good away to initiate buzz marketing.

8. Innovation/Incentives: Its important that a company marketing products/services to GEN Y consistently come out with new and innovative products on a regularly basis. GEN Yers expect continued new ideas and inventions on a regular basis, considering that we are used to such happenings from birth. GEN Yers also respond well to incentives, discounts, and free stuff. By utilizing a combination of those or all three, your company is sure to create a good initial buzz and interest in what you are trying to sell.

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We saw in the ad campaigns for the Super Bowl the first real push to get consumers to come up with marketing campaigns for products. This was a very successful approach for the companies involved as they not only produced innovative, consumer driven ads, but also received secondary publicity from the contests.

I’d like to see companies take this a step further and begin introducing contests in which the consumers come up with ways to make products more environmentally friendly. This would not only allow the eco-conscious among us make the world a little greener, but it would also provide secondary publicity not only from the contest itself, but also from news stories about the company’s environmental friendliness.

So many of us in Gen-Y want greener products and would respond positively to a company and their products given the knowledge that they are trying to innovate to provide a greener world.

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Generation-Y wants, Marketing to college students, Corporate Innovation | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

Opening the latest Vogue or GQ, readers are flooded with images of Uma Thurman, Matthew McConaughey, and Lindsey Lohan telling you that their product makes you a star or is what the new hip thing. But in all reality, is this an effective way to advertise anymore?

As a college student, most of these types of items are out of reach and otherwise, the celeb is not someone I would like to associate myself with. What happened to the plain Jane model, why does every product need to be paired with a certain Hollywood star? If anything, the fact that stars like Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt get paid millions of dollars to be in a 30 second ad and endorse a product turns me off and makes me think that the company has run out of creativity choosing the overused celeb endorsement. Campaigns that are clever (e.g. the Truth campaign, iPod dancing people) are few and far between. It’s a fine line between projecting an image of cool by using a celeb and reflecting that it is simply something that a normal person would never look good in.

With all the computer technology that now allows a billboard or ad to literally change a person’s appearance to be more ‘appealing’, how can a person trust an ad in general? (Check out the transformation of a model from before makeup to billboard at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=v3YvvFbsj94) Do advertising campaigns ever think of the societal impact they can create in the minds of their target market? Is Mischa Barton really the best example of a normal young adult for a clothing line?

Basically, celebrity endorsements show laziness or create unreal views of how the ‘normal’ person should look like. Most people don’t find them realistic; yes, I wish I had lips like Angelina Jolie and a butt like Jennifer Lopez, but that isn’t real. What happened to the creativity seen in the Levi’s commercials in the mid 90s or cool Propel fitness water ads of people appearing from drops of water? Companies need to bring the ad campaigns back to reality and give people some fresh ideas to inspire new product consumption rather than the surrealism of a celebrity image.

No Comments | Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Voice of the customer | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

I am a recent college graduate and soon will be looking for my first “real job” in the US (currently I am an English teacher in Korea). During my time in Korea I have had a plethora of free time for self study about different career paths and random opportunities. The internet has been invaluable for this because it has allowed me to search for books on amazon, read the wall street journal, listen to podcasts on various topics and find out what type of job I am interested in.

Here is my problem:

I have finally started narrowing down my ideas for what type of job I want but now I need to think about companies. I believe we are in a unique position as Gen-Y youth because with all this information available to us we should really be able to find a company that works with our lifestyle.

For example: I love the prospect of work, but I also love to travel. There is no website (that I know of) that ranks businesses (most likely big) on the amount of travel time it gives their employees.

Take it a step further. I want a website that ranks different companies in several ways from 1. job perks, 2. management styles, 3. a place for current employees to freely, candidly and anonymously criticize (for better or for worse) their company. I also want to know what kind of medical insurance, travel time, overtime, salary and just about anything else that the company does.

Then I want all of this data to be collected and used under many different areas such as 1. best companies to work for, 2. best companies to work for in different fields, 3. I want to be able to compare different companies so that I can truly gain insight into different companies.

For example: In my perfect job website I will be able to compare different companies on one or many different variables. Therefore, I can use salary, travel time, and employee welfare (filled out by employees from the company) as the variables. I can then choose companies I have heard of and compare them, or have the website find the best companies to compare with those variables.

This will be a powerful tool for the employee. The world is changing and so is the business world. People are different, and companies all have different cultures and various factors that make them better or worse. Why just find a job when you can find a job that fits you?

I believe that with a tool like this people will find jobs that they truly care about, and as I know personally and have heard: If you care about what you are doing you will do a much finer job in the long run.

Hope this wasn’t too long.

Eric.

No Comments | Generating Ideas & Ideation Techniques, Managing Ideas, Innovation Techniques, Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

It seems that its about time for me to weigh in again about the sorry state of marketing geared to Gen Y individuals. Granted, I can be a very judgmental individual, but there are so few really quality marketing campaigns out there that I often find myself telling my friends that there needs to be a group that has to approve all marketing campaigns and ads to save us from having to watch some of the truly awful ones.

On that note, I’d like to propose an option for companies looking to market to Gen Y and college students. Marketing firms should be making use of the internet to put together focus groups who watch the ad campaigns via streaming video or evaluate print ads on some website. By mining the data on social websites like Facebook and MySpace, companies could identify individuals that they want to be part of the focus group and invites could be sent to those individuals with a promise of compensation for participating.

I’m sure there must be online focus groups already in operation, but aside from using the social websites to identify individuals to take part in the group, my other innovation for this undertaking would incorporate a device to monitor physiological responses from the individual watching the ad. I remember a West Wing episode in which a focus group watching Bartlett giving a state of the union address were monitored using a simple dial that they adjusted in response to what Bartlett was saying. A simple extension of this approach would be a device that is shipped to the individual in the focus group. The group members would hook this device up to a USB port on their computer and before watching the ad, they would place their hand on the device, which would measure electrical and physiological responses to the ad. A baseline could be taken by also showing the group members ad campaigns that the company thinks are ones they either want to emulate or not emulate.

This approach would allow marketing firms to reach the ever so important Gen Y demographic in a very controlled manner and would also provide more information than they would get from a simple form that group members would also fill out after watching the ad campaign.

No Comments | Creativity & Brainstorming, Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation, Managing Generation Y | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

The web offers us a vast array of sites to connect with our friends and others with similar interests. The number of options out there (Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, etc.) can be overwhelming. Unfortunately, the ability to connect with friends when you’re on the go is underwhelming. For instance, if you’re logged on to one of the sites at a coffee shop, there’s no way to know if someone in your network is in the vicinity. Also, the ability to discover if someone with similar interests is in the same coffee shop is lacking.

Given these two situations: 1. So many sites for social networking and 2. No way to find out if your friends or possible friends are around, I propose Connecting On the Go (or, as I have just now decided to call it, COGO) to rectify the situation.

Here’s the basic idea. First, the software/site would allow you to enter your info for any networking/friend/profile site. It would also allow you to pick one picture to associate with your combined profile that would come from all the different sites. It would act as a master repository for all your likes/dislikes/interests and friends. It could also conceivably incorporate information from say your mp3 collection or google news profile. The purpose of this master repository is to allow the consumer to connect with friends or people with similar profiles on the go.

The ever so important connecting would happen in the following manner using either a laptop or web-enabled digitial device (pda, mobile phone, etc) and blue tooth. The software associate with the site would occasionally scan other blue tooth devices in the area. When it finds a device with an associated profile of either one of your friends or someone with a profile that matches your criteria (say a single female who likes Van Morrison) you would be notified of the opportunity to connect via a pop-up, text message, etc. with the profile picture of the person, his/her name and the fact that they’re in range. This information could then be used to go chat with a friend in the area, or make a new friend.

I imagine that this service could become extremely useful as more and more folks have web enabled phones. Imagine the utility of being out in a bar or a coffee shop, just drinking or reading and getting a notification that the girl/guy of your dreams is in the bar and getting a picture of that person to guide you right to her/him.

2 Comments | Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

After viewing the Super Bowl ads, Nationwide’s commercial featuring K-Fed was certainly my favorite. It was hilarious and also made you acknowledge that “life comes at you fast” because of the tangible pop culture example they gave. I think this was an excellent ad targeting Gen Y and may get them to actually think about the need for financial services. I would have liked more information about the company though and the service they provide because it did not get communicated to me prominently. I must say that I investigated it a bit after the ad aired though. I also think the self deprecating humor was a good career move for Kevin Federline. I actually liked the music, found my head bobbing to the beats and his flow, and checked the commercial and K-Fed’s website later during the super bowl! That says something about the ad as well…that I would leave the super bowl to watch a commercial again and visit K-Feds website! I think this ad was the best example of a great commercial and one that could become viral. I’ll be interested in seeing statistics of video views on YouTube. There also was a “stickiness” factor with this ad. The “Federline Fries!” shout by the manager at the end was a show stopper and memorable. I already hear buzz that this will be a memorable pop culture slogan. I quickly thought that this slogan would make a great domain name to have for this blog! This creative advertising idea concept seems like something that we would have generated at our brainstorm sessions with really creative Gen Y idea generators. At our brainstorm this past week we had fun with creating a whole variety of marketing messages such as these. It was excellent because the ad will live on virally through YouTube and in conversations. Authored by Darin Eich.

No Comments | Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, New Concepts & Ideas | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

As many of you already know, ESPN has taken a large amount of time and money fully developing their ESPN 360. However, as nice as I am sure that this service is, I have not experienced it - similar to many other Americans. This is because ESPN is requiring ISPs to sign on a subscription fee to use this service (subscription fees account for 60% of ESPN’s revenue.) I fully understand the importance for the company to be approaching the problem with this type of business model but I know that there are a lot of opportunities for innovation in this business model. I am going to throw one idea out there on how ESPN could potentially make more money without charging for subscribers and I hope that a lot of other people add their thoughts to the comments on how other models could do the same

I am envisioning a world where ESPN 360 is used as a compliment to the current ESPN programming. In this world I would be watching my favorite sports team, the Wisconsin Badgers Basketball team, on the TV while I am also following along the game on my laptop computer. If I am curious about the stats from one of the players I can easily use the content on ESPN 360 to look up these stats while still enjoying the game. The best part of viewing a game this way is I can easily go back and see highlights from past plays right on my laptop and create my own highlight reel from the game which I can email to anyone following the game, which would drive even more people to the ESPN 360 website. The real seller of this new system would be the very targeted marketing that the new ESPN360 system could provide. In order to be a viewer of the new website you would have to subscribe to the service and complete a five minute quiz in which ESPN would be able to identify your demographics and interests. Through this ESPN would be able to advertise to the individual instead of the masses. A business would be able to come in and say that it only wanted to purchase advertising that would reach males between the ages of 18-25. ESPN would be able to easily provide this type of coverage for any business. Through this model ESPN would be able to have much more people visiting their website and be able to attract more money per viewer for its advertising through its targeted marketing system.

All in all, ESPN’s service would be able to be enjoyed by more people while, hopefully, making more money than the current model allows. I look forward to what other ideas the brainstormers have to innovate on the business model for ESPN360.

1 Comment | Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Open Innovation, Voice of the customer, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

We’ve all experienced it, the sudden change in production quality from a national ad campaign to the comparatively low production quality of an ad from a local company. Being someone who is already inclined to be dismissive of most national ads, the sheer (I don’t want to say it, but can’t think of a better word) ineptitude illustrated in so many market-specific ad campaigns is very frustrating.

With digital technology offering low cost production values and so many media-savvy consumers out there, the opportunity for hip, inexpensive local ad production is out there. My main point here is that there are resources in the form of Gen-Y folks who know how to produce videos and have ideas about appealing to consumers out there. Especially in local ads, too many companies rely on the tried and true method of having a semi-famous local celeb telling you about the great deals to be had. Local marketing campaigns should ideally serve as a testing ground for larger national ads, as states provide testing grounds for social programs.

To be competitive and to draw in new customers, locally based companies should employ the technological-know-how of Gen Y individuals and make use of their understanding of effective marketing techniques.

1 Comment | Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Corporate Innovation | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

This is by far my most fanciful idea blogged about yet! No marketing here (which is interesting - as most of my blogs have been marketing related despite the fact that I’m a scientist and have no marketing background what-so-ever).

If you’re like me, you’ve often asked yourself after saying or doing something, “What if I had said/done X instead of Y?” Well, WHAT IF you could at least get a response (either before or after) based on probabilities and characteristics of the person or entity you said(say)/did(do) X to?

The idea is that there’s a website/service that collects information either via a personality test or likes/dislikes and a test that posits a situation and gathers the responses. In this way, a database of likely responses based on personality could be built up. Then, you as a subscriber to the service could query, either before or after, WHAT IF, I had done/do this, what will the person/entity say? How cool would that be? No more wondering, hmm should I ask this girl to a movie or a walk in the park (maybe very useful for the socially-challenged).

A spin-off of this could be related to one of the ideas that’s always floating around out there in the ether. Easy ways to connect with/meet new people at social hangouts. You have your mobile device with your music, websites, facebook profile etc. on it and see someone you want to go talk to. Both devices being equiped with WiFi or Bluetooth, instead of going up to the person cold with no idea what they like and having to ask yourself WHAT IF? afterwards, you could find out from their mobile device what bands/books/movies they like and have an immediate ice breaker.

No Comments | Generation-Y wants, Gen-Y ideas, Open Innovation, New Concepts & Ideas | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this