Marketing to the Next Generation

Guy Kawasaki (managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm) recently held a panel discussion in Santa Clara with a group on high school and college students which offered a fascinating insight into how to marketing to the next generation of consumers (18-24).

There is a video of the whole panel discussion at Veotag. Note that I have never used Veotag before, but I instantly loved the ability to move back and forth between the segments that interest me. It is much more effective than anything that Google Video or Yahoo video has.

So what are the traits of the Next Generation?

• The don’t watch a lot TV or employ much traditional media; One average they watch 1-2 hours of TV a week
• They don’t tolerate commercials, and don’t have to; Heavy use of Tivo to avoid any commercials
• They are very mobile; Text messaging is a huge part of staying in contact with friends and family
• They reject overly slick (inauthentic) content and messages.

Tom Hayes summed these traits up as:

In short, they don’t use the media we use (at least in the same way), they don’t want to be interrupted, they don’t stay still long enough to engage, they don’t want their space invaded and they are turned off by highly packaged pitches.

So what is the Next Generation receptive too?:

• Extremely high usage of MySpace and FaceBook. If you are targeting the college crowd, then you must have a presence on Facebook
• Surprisingly, Microsoft Office with Word and PowerPoint are the two tools of students. Those who have been predicting the demise of Microsoft are a little premature
• This generation is surrounded by a lot of noise from advertisers which causes a lot of resentment. They manage to block out the white noise through technology like Tivo, or software to block pop-up and banners ads.

A couple of things jumped out at me during this section. One was the universal usage of Wikipedia as a trusted source of information. For brands, the fact that Wikipedia is now the source of information about your brand is something that has to keep marketing managers awake at night. Second is that divide between MySpace and Facebook users that a lot of marketers are not aware off. Traditionally MySpace has attracted more of a high school demographic while Facebook has traditionally been for the college student. This will change somewhat as Facebook opens itself up to anyone to join, but the key point is that if your customer base is more of the college crowd then you need to have a presence on Facebook.

So how do you market to the next generation?

• They rely heavily on referrals from friends, peers and celebrities for buying cues
• They want active interaction, not passive purchasing;
• They can be reached by “work of mouth,” so actively campaign

That the next generation it turned off by traditional Madison Avenue advertising and tunes out all direct advertising pitches. What they are receptive too is referrals from “credible sources”. These sources can be peers, trusted web sites, blogs or celebrities. As Tom Hayes put it, this “Generation doesn’t want to buy from you. But if they discover you on their own terms, they may invite you into their lives.”

This is a terrific video to watch. Guy Kawasaki’s takeaway was:

The bottom line message is that before you waste your marketing dollars, you should watch what the panelists had to say”