Asia's Leading Highly Specialized Youth Agency

Young Ideas Salon will be hitting the town March 2010.  For the first time in Malaysia, this Salon will be held in conjunction with the Mobile Youth Unconference Asia 2010 in Berjaya Times Square Hotel, in the heart of Kuala Lumpur.

Guest Speakers
Guest Speakers will line up with local Asian youth in a head-to-head discussion about marketing, media and change

Bernard Hor – Youth Engagement Specialist, Summer Sands Group (M)
Graham Brown – Author & Director What Youth Think
Ian Stewart – Head of Friendster, Asia
Niki Cheong – Social Media, Malaysia
Samyak Chakrabarty – Electronic Youth Media Group, India
John Solomon – enoVate, China
Faisal Muhammad – Youth Research Laboratory, Indonesia

Launching in February 2010 in Mumbai, this 2010 tour (see agenda) will share insights from 4 continents on:

* ground breaking youth media trends
* how brands are working with youth to shape their product development
* how brands leverage youth influencers in their marketing
* why youth love/hate brands and which ones are in/out

Note: we define youth as 5-29 yr olds

Register now for the Young Ideas Salon KL.  Click here to register.

The tour is the result of a partnership between the Youth Research Partners managed in London by What Youth Think (the brains behind mobileYouth).

Continue Reading

This is it.

2010 is the year those with the deepest youth customer insights will win.

Mobile Youth Unconference Asia 2010 is the premier event gathering 350 youth trendsetters (18-25), marketeers, stakeholders, media, innovators, tech experts and investors.

While the youth trendsetters continues to actively ‘move & shake’ the commercial world, this Unconference takes a good in-depth look on current youth insights and trends, what’s really going on in the youth community and how youth brands can effectively engage with the youth market.

Here’s a Sneak Peak into what’s brewing at the Mobile Youth Unconference Asia 2010 ; 11 & 12 March 2010.

Exclusive Keynote by Youth Specialists from the Youth Research Partners*
Listen to a panel of Youth Specialists as they share successful youth engagement strategies and activations with you.
Learn from internationally-recognized highly specialized youth agencies from London, China, India, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia.

*Youth Research Partners is the world’s first and only global network of Highly Specialized Youth Agencies spreading across the Europe, Asia, South Africa, South America and the US continents. (www.youthresearchpartners.com)

Young Ideas Salon
Do you know your young market via datas and statistics?
Or…do you really know What Youth Think and Want?
For the first time ever in Malaysia, 4 Young Ideas Salons will run concurrently touching on a wide range of youth engagement topics i.e. new media, technology, mobile & public sectors.
Conducted in a lively atmosphere, this unconference style setup allows full interaction between youth trendsetters and youth brands.
The Salons are kept in small breakout groups to ensure a high intensity of no-nonsense, no-hold-barred real time live feedbacks, ideas and debates among the delegates.

Awesome Pitch
Is your youth marketing winning customers or winning awards for your agency?
Are you marketing TO or marketing WITH?
It’s time to put your strategies to some real test – right in front of your young market.
Pitch it to the youth trendsetters live – 2010 is the year your young market is going to tell you whether you’re good or you’re actually truly relevant.

GrassRoots Action
Ever wonder how youths run a campaign or organize a campus event?
Ever wonder why you’re always paying (sponsorships) but not achieving desired returns?
Have Youth Trendsetters pitch selected projects/campaigns/events to you.
Learn from the grassroots youth how it is done, what are the factors involved.

“In 2010, Attention is your biggest cost. Youth only process 5% of the marketing information they receive at any time, 95% being ignored…” Youth Research Partners, 2010

What makes you worthy of that 5%?
Listen, Learn and Engage.

Youth Party
2010 will see grassroots youth movements actively mushrooming within the communities.
Party on with more than 500 grassroots youth as we gather local youth movements to jointly host this party.
It’s time to take that first step to build that quality relationship with your young market.

“2010 is the watershed year when marketers will shift to match the changing landscape;
youth no longer want to hear stories told about brands, they want to tell their own…”

Are you telling your own stories or helping your young customers tell theirs?

Youth Biz-Match
Opportunities, opportunities, opportunities.
It is all about getting onto the right platform where doors open up and opportunities are abundance.
Youth Biz-Match allows youths to schedule appointments with key decision makers of the various youth brands to take on collaborative proposals together.
This ‘business matching’ session(s) are to be scheduled during lunch hours and business fellowship sessions throughout the Unconference.

Registration goes live 1 February 2010 @ www.mobileyouth.my

Mobile Youth Unconference Asia 2010 is proudly brought to you by Summer Sands Group (Malaysia), MAD Incubator (Malaysia), mobileYouth (London) and GrassRoots Youth Network.

Continue Reading

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

Continue Reading