Tag Youth

Lessons in youth marketing during a recession

by Inyoung Hwang
May 05, 2009

WASHINGTON – Companies have felt the need in this recession to ramp up innovative advertising tactics when targeting young adults, a demographic that has been elusive to marketers in recent years.

The weakened consumer confidence and spending in the U.S. have affected an age-group previously thought to be more recession-resilient.

A survey by the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson Company found 77 percent of young adults, people 18-29, feel nervous and anxious about the impact of the recession. Teen spending on fashion also declined 14 percent over the last year, according to a report by the investment bank Piper Jaffray.

The challenge becomes twofold for companies as they combat an economic downturn, while trying to capture a new kind of savvy customers made up of teenagers and twenty-somethings living in the internet age.

“They’re not passive consumers of anything,” said Carol Phillips, a marketing professor at University of Notre Dame. “You have to kind of market with them rather than to them.”

Phillips described how, as a consumer group, young adults can be a “moving target” because of  the rapid changes in technology. An evolving relationship with technology leads to an entirely different relationship with marketing, she explained.

For marketers, young adults tend to be a more skeptical, team-oriented bunch, who are equipped with a sense of confidence that comes with the ease of finding information online. Even if an advertisement is backed by research or substantiated claims, young adults still assume it needs to be verified.

“They take everything with a definite grain of salt,” Phillips said. “They’re much more likely to rely on what their friends say or what they read in a third-party blog.”

Morris Levy, senior at the University of New Hampshire, said even if a new product like a video game sparked his interest, he would hold off on purchasing it until he understood it better.

“I’d look into it more – look at reviews online, ratings from different companies and news sources,” he said.

Gary Rudman, the president of GTR Consulting, a market research firm, said video game companies will sometimes provide free clips of games to websites like IGN Entertainment. It’s a simple but successful word-of-mouth strategy that allows young people to feel like they’re finding things on their own and then talk to friends about it.

“It doesn’t feel like a marketer is forcing something down  your throat,” he said. “You’ve gone to a place to find it, you’ve discovered it, and you share it with the world.”

The challenge in advertising to teenagers and young adults can be reaching them at their multiple methods of communication, especially since online advertising is still a tricky obstacle for marketers. Very successful brands understand there’s nothing better than having something “bubble up from the bottom,” according to Rudman.

“It’s very important to allow them to market to each other,” Phillips said. “Information is currency. Give them things that they value so they will share it with their friends.”

With the ongoing recession, however, the experiences of friends may have other ripple effects as well. Levy said seeing his friends have trouble landing part-time jobs has caused him to be more conscious of saving money.

“Small cuts whenever possible now,” Levy said.

The media coverage of the financial crisis has also changed spending .

“You stop buying random trendy items,” said Elizabeth Eun, a junior at Boston University. “You stick to buying things that are going to last longer and save you money in the long run.”

She mentioned Apple and American Apparel as noteworthy brands that have relied on pairing brightly-colored advertisements with sleek designs to project images of ‘unique’ and ‘hip’.

Apple recently launched a series of “There’s an app for that” TV commercials, one of which appeals to how the device can make life easier for students.

But in the case of American Apparel, the strategy can backfire as popularity causes the brand to lose its sense of uniqueness and consumers become less willing to spend dollars on the cotton clothing basics the company sells.

“People used to be willing to pay $40 to $50 for a hoodie, but not so much anymore,” she said.

Consumers are known to gravitate back to names they know and trust in a recession, but with young adults this trend doesn’t hold as true. Brands don’t have as long a shelf-life with young consumers, unless they continue to transform with the times, according to Rudman.

For companies able to alter their image and adapt, there may be opportunity in the economic downturn through deep discounting and heavy promotions.

“Brands need to offer more for less by offering price-conscious teens products and services where they feel they are getting a bigger bang for their buck,” said Anastasia Goodstein, founder of Ypulse.com, a youth media and marketing website.

Goodstein said higher-end brands might consider launching lower cost product lines and offering incentives like “buy three,get one free” or promoting layaway plans in order to keep old customers and lure new ones.

“They’re relatively young consumers so their allegiances aren’t completely set yet,” Phillips said. “They’re pretty open to trying new things.”

Youth Vs. Adults in Gadget Wars

By MARTHA IRVINE, AP National Writer

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Scott Seigal was awakened one recent early morning by a cell phone text message. It was from his girlfriend’s mother.

His friends’ parents have posted greetings on his MySpace page for all the world to see. And his 72-year-old grandmother sends him online instant messages every day so they can better stay in touch while he’s at college.

“It’s nice that adults know SOME things,” says Seigal, an 18-year-old freshman at Binghamton University in New York. He especially likes IMing with his grandma because he’s “not a huge talker on the phone.”

Increasingly, however, he and other young people are feeling uncomfortable about their elders encroaching on what many young adults and teens consider their technological turf.

Long gone are the days when the average, middle-aged adult did well to simply work a computer. Now those same adults have Gmail, upload videos on YouTube, and sport the latest high-tech gadgets.

Young people have responded, as they always have, by searching out the latest way to stay ahead in the race for technological know-how and cool. They use Twitter, which allows blogging from one’s mobile phone or BlackBerry, or Hulu.com, a site where they can download videos and TV programs.

They customize their cell phones with various faceplates and ringtones. And, sometimes, they find ways to exclude adults — using high-frequency ringtones that teens can hear but most adults can’t, for instance.

Nowhere are the technological turf wars more apparent than on social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, which went from being student-oriented to allowing adults outside the college ranks to join.

Gary Rudman, a California-based youth market researcher, has heard the complaints. He regularly interviews young people who think it’s “creepy” when an older person — we’re talking someone they know — asks to join their social network as a “friend.” It means, among other things, that they can view each others’ profiles and what they and their friends post.

“It would be like a 40-year-old attending the prom or a frat party,” Rudman says. “It just doesn’t work.”

It’s a particular quandary for image-conscious teens, says Eric Kuhn, a junior at Hamilton College in upstate New York, who’s blogged about the etiquette of social networking.

He accepted his mom’s invitation to be Facebook friends and has, in turn, become online friends with other adults she knows. But so far, he says, his 16-year-old sister has declined to add their mom “because she thinks it is not cool.”

Lakeshia Poole, a 24-year-old from Atlanta, says “my Facebook self has become a watered down version of me.” Worried about older adults snooping around, she’s now more careful about what she posts and has also made her profile private, so only her online friends can see it.

“It’s somewhat a Catch-22, because now I’m hidden from the people I would really like to connect with,” she says.

Lauren Auster-Gussman, a freshman at Juniata College in Pennsylvania, says it’s particularly awkward when one of her parents’ friends asks to join her social network. She thinks Facebook should only be used by people younger than, say, 40.

“I mean, I’m in college,” she says. “There are bound to be at least a few drunken pictures of me on Facebook, and I don’t need my parents’ friends seeing them.”

There are ways around the problem.

It’s possible on some sites, for instance, to limit what someone can see on your profile, though some users think it’s a pain to have to deal with that.

“That is the beauty of Facebook and other online social networks. If you want to only interact with your peers, then you can adjust the settings to only allow that,” says Katie Jones, a senior at Ohio Wesleyan University, who’s studied ways prospective students use Facebook to contact students at colleges and universities they’re interested in attending.

It’s also possible to simply decline or ignore an adult’s request to be an online friend. Or adults could back off and only use social networking to contact their own peers.

But it’s not always so easy to relinquish that control, especially for parents of teens, says Kathryn Montgomery, the author of “Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce and Childhood in the Age of the Internet” and mother of a 14-year-old.

“As parents, we have to figure out where to draw the line between encouraging and allowing our teens to have autonomy, to experience their separate culture, and when we need to monitor their use of media,” says Montgomery, a professor of communication at American University.

She says it’s especially important to help young people understand that social networking is often more public than they think. Sometimes monitoring them is the best way to do that.

Sue Frownfelter, a 46-year-old mom in Flint, Mich., thinks it’s less of an issue for parents who discover technology with — or even before — their children. Among other things, she has a blog, uses Twitter and has a Chumby, a personal Internet device that displays anything from news and weather to photos and eBay auctions.

Her children, ages 9 and 11, begged her to allow them to have a MySpace page, because she does. Instead, she suggested Imbee.com, a social networking site for kids that allows parental monitoring.

“I can’t imagine my life without technology! It has truly become an extension of who I am and who my family will likely be,” says Frownfelter, who works at a community college.

Still, in today’s world, parents are finding that the urge to stake out technological turf is starting at a very young age.

Jennifer Abelson, a mom in New York, says her 2-year-old daughter asks every day if she can play on the “‘puter” on such kid-oriented sites as Noggin.com and Nickjr.com.

“She’s constantly telling us ‘I will do it!’ and ‘Go away!’ if we try to interfere with her ‘working,'” Abelson says.

“It’s pretty amazing to see technology ingrained at such a young age. But I know she’s learned so much from being able to use technology on her own.”

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Martha Irvine is an AP national writer. She can be reached at mirvine(at)ap.org or via http://myspace.com/irvineap