Asia's Leading Highly Specialized Youth Agency

Notice how outstanding brands like Monster Energy, Vans, Red Bull, Jet Blue, Apple, Nike and Jones Soda are confident in standing for their values? That’s because they’re not focusing on the 100% we call “the market” but the 10% who are already sold on their product.

Saying “no” more often is the best advice a manager can take on board these days; we’re often trying to please everyone resulting in mediocrity as opposed to standing for something.

UNASHAMEDLY NOT FOR YOU

When Red Bull decides to market it invests its energies in the 10% – the Passionistas – those already sold on the brand. No point selling to the likes of you and me – let the other customers do that because it’s those 10% that influence the 90%. That 10% is the most influential constituency you have access to. That’s why they come up with ideas like Rooms of Red Bull – 90% of you’ll hate it…good.

The problem with the Pepsi Generation approach to engaging customers is that influencers don’t want to be lumped en masse into the mass. They want to feel significant in their own way and its brands that are able to give them this access to cultural context that are winning the game of advocacy.

Great brands, great services know where their Beachhead is – they know growing a brand is no different to managing a farm; you only have so much seed to scatter and a lot of acres. When Scion aims its sights at the youthful lifestyle that encompasses its brands it doesn’t care if most of the market doesn’t like, participate or have interest in the kind of situational contexts it creates. The approach works. Marketing theory is only just catching up.

WORLD OF WARCRAFT

When your customers talk of “the viability of Shadow Priests” you know this kind of dialogue isn’t going to appeal to the mass. But, WoW players aren’t the mass-market – they’re a legion of passionate customers who, still to this day, are the brand’s most effective marketing department.

CINDERELLA TIME

When a retail outlet in Tokyo starts pushing “Cinderella Time” to attract 20 something females it also knows that it’s going to isolate a wide range of potential customers. That’s why LCafe isn’t afraid to ban males during certain periods because it isn’t catering for the 90% – it’s focusing its product testing environment on an elite and highly influential niche whose advocacy will eventually warm the rest of the market.

NIKE 6.0 – Contextualizing Influence

Closer to home, Nike knows that to win the trust game it needs to win over the opinion leaders. Traditionally this would mean a high visibility series of media buys, a tier 1 name sponsorship with global reach. But these days, these strategies spoken are rarely spoken with confidence in the same sentence as “youth” by the most progressive of brands. Nike knows that capturing influence means going the extra yard. Nike’s project in San Clemente (Nike 6.0) is certainly an eye-opener; a motel renovated to house influencers and athletes for a whole Summer.

Nike calls Motel No Tell “the most unique stop along the journey to the world-class wave, Trestles.”

Being unique means creating context that captures the eye and needs of the influencers. This is so focused in fact, 90% of you haven’t heard of it yet which, according to the logic followed here, is the sign of a successful marketing strategy.

Passionistas are exactly that; youth with passion – youth able to influence large swathes of the market because they, like the brands, aren’t afraid to plant their flag in the earth and let followers rally round.

The difference between Passionista and the rest, isn’t just a factor of 1 or 2 times influence but potentially 1000s. As the legendary former CTO of Microsoft Nathan Myrhvold once said, the difference between an elite programmer and a good one isn’t that the elite programmer is 5 or 10x more productive, it’s that they are 10,000 times more productive. Similarly, the difference between the people in your market is pronounced – so why invest your energies democratically?

Imagine the difference in returns in $100 of marketing invested each in one of two young prospects – one completely sold, the other unsold on your brand. As Seth asks “How big is your farm?” Chances are it’s pretty big… The question isn’t “How am I going to reach the whole farm?” but “How do I concentrate my efforts?”

“Who Are Your Passionistas?” is written by Graham Brown, our Global Partner from London.

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Youth don’t wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with your mobile app or your brand on their mind – so why do we think otherwise?

Let’s face it - youth don’t care about you, your product, your latest whatever or the fact that you’re the leading, the biggest, the most innovative whoever…

Your biggest cost today is not your marketing budget or product development but youth INDIFFERENCE

So when you launch a new product, they don’t care. Once you start realizing that, you start realizing how you can use it to your advantage because there are countless technology companies out there who believe that their technology and service alone is enough to win over young consumers.

You only need to spend a week down in sunny Barcelona any given February to understand how where this is coming from.

Marketing Campaign + Youth Indifference to Your Brand = Guaranteed LT Failure

Reality Check.

Youth care only about themselves. We should know, we trained them as their parents and we were the same. In fact, since time immemorial, we have only ever cared about ourselves and what you can do for me.

So, let’s consider the brand.

Red Bull works because it seeks first to understand then be understood. (Stephen Covey’s 3rd habit of “Highly Effective People” for those that are interested). Red Bull sought to understand its people before it set upon them and it found that youth didn’t want another soda drink – they wanted something that facilitated their social existence. Red Bull not only provided that fuel (literally) but also provided events that create the social hub itself (Red Bull Air Race, extreme sports competitions etc).

So how do we measure up?

My own research shows there’s at least 30 “leading providers of” targeting the mobile Youth segment in the Americas and Europe. Youth don’t care. Let’s get with the program before we end up becoming the next Levi’s or the music industry in its entirety. It’s no wonder that young consumers are now arming themselves with the mindset and technology to blank out advertising altogether. 80% of new VCRs will have ad-skipping technology by default by 2008 (Jupiter Research). 69% of consumers were interested in technology that skipped or blocked advertising (Yankelovich 2004)

We have low expectations of our results and high expectations of youth engagement

Our industry standards are low. We expect indifference as the norm and operate in tandem with other industries that consistently score poorly in consumer satisfaction. Take the airlines for example and this quote from Jet Blue’s departing CEO Edmondson-Jones

“Indifference. Indifference directed at the passenger. It’s easy to feel that you’ve lost your dignity flying the big guys. You are a number and a boarding pass. It’s like a cattle call…. Everyone’s trying to shave three or four cents off a passenger. Passenger expectations are so low that when you help them with their baggage, it’s a real shock from what they’re used to.” He went on to add: “It’s amazing that the level of expectations for airlines in general and especially for discount entrants is so low that if you set your standards high, it’s easy to create a reputation for customer service.”

According to Informa’s “Minimising Mobile Churn Strategic Report’s exclusive Industry Survey carried out in May 2006″, 75% of operators said an acceptable level of churn would be 15% or less. 15% is just “average” in the cross-industry Loyalty Guide of 2006.

So how is it that we as an industry have arrived at the acceptance of being just “average” in young consumer eyes?

We fail to understand because we seek first to impress our own agenda on them (3G, LBS, MMS, Web 2.0) before we understand them. The subsequent lack of long term interest in their uptake is dismissed as being the product of typically “fickle” youth rather than poorly executed marketing campaigns. Fact is they don’t care about 3G, “killer apps” or “web2.0″ in the first place.

Realizing the source is often half the solution itself and here we have it -

Young consumers don’t care that you know unless they first know that you care

So ask yourself – How are we communicating to our young consumers that we care? How are we actively involved in first creating something for them before we seek to receive their trust? To what extent is our marketing and product story about them as opposed to us?

This article is a re-post via our Global Partner mobileYouth.  Visit our buddies over in London @ www.mobileyouth.org

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