Youth Marketing is all about something you do with not to youth.” Graham Brown (mobileYouth 2008 Report)
Following my earlier riff about trends in the marketing of Great Youth Brands (last time was Red Bull), I’d like to talk about one of my favourites.
This is the key question - how does a mass market “everything to everybody” brand build relevance with a specific segment - such as Youth?
Consider this challenge facing the largest and most profitable automotive manufacturer in the world - Toyota.
Toyota cannot roll out customized fat pipe blinged rims low riding coupes for the mass market because their core value of reliability is also one of a generic appeal - they will alienate your grandmother and the school teacher.
So this is how Toyota does it - meet Scion - the Toyota sub-brand that no one knows is actually Toyota (unless you study the marque a little harder).
Check the video - this is real ownership and consumer generated content in action, this is consumer ownership of the brand - creating rather than sponsoring events, local Scikotics, magazines etc.
One of the key research findings from our mobileYouth 2008 Social Media report was the exponential growth in Twitter usage by youth. We now see Under 25s as the heaviest users of Twitter!
Is Twitter SMS 2.0?
From being predominantly the domain of 25-34 year old techs, Twitter has burgeoned into a valid youth platform. Here are some interesting findings:
* Youth twitter usage rapidly adopting similar patterns to SMS usage implications for operator charging, marketing channels, PR abound…
* Under 25s now constitute 25% of twitter usage - the largest single age group
* Japanese youth have rapidly adopted twitter into their daily social activities. Go watch the public Twitter feed and witness how much Japanese content passes through.
* Twitter still has a long way to go to reach the lowest common denominator that made SMS fly but it has the advantage of a core consumer beachhead to play with.
Interested in Twitter?
Check out mobileYouth’s own Graham Brown and Josh Dhaliwal on Twitter
Report links
* Download the Report PDF
* Social Media Presentation here
* Recommendations from the Social Media Report
* About the Report
Technorati Tags: twitter, social media, youth marketing, mobile youth, mobileyouth
Areas of interest:
* What do youth want from and think of their operators?
* Youth loyalty & churn (leading to Net Promoter Score)
* Trust Measurement as impact on Profitability
* Next Generation Brands (Red Bull, Jones Soda, EA, Scion etc)
Here’s the download for my (Graham Brown) presentation to Telenor Djuice in Oslo, October 2008 at the Djuice brand summit.
Technorati Tags: telenor, djuice, youth, mobileyouth, mobile youth, mobile youth report, youth marketing, youth research, net promoter score, churn, youth loyalty, crm, red bull, jones soda, EA, scion, graham brown
Presentation

Summary of my Understanding Mobile Youth Workshop @ The Prepaid Mobile Summit IIR 22-25 September 2008 in Prague.
Note contains video not available on Powerpoint. MobileYouthNet to view on the street videos in full.
powerpoint, presentation, youth, marketing, download
Posted on September 2nd, 2008 in youth, youth marketing | Comments Off
'High School Musical 3' on MySpace (since most of the viewers are over 14, right?)
- Club Penguin's newspaper (doing better than its real world counterparts - kinda funny) (Wired)
- Smart girls rock! (new Vanilla Star Jeans ad featuring Olympic gold medal gymnast Nastia Liukin) (Media Post, reg. required)
- Teens wary of mobile ads (limited by price and chatty as ever. Lots of mobile research from ComScore) (Media Post, reg. required)
- Energy drinks (making teens sick.) (L.A. Times, reg. required)
- Teens react to Palin pregnancy (once again teen pregnancy dominates the headlines....thanks Andrea! Also, for all you educators reading -- the story about the Wikipedia edits made to Palin's entry is a great teachable moment)
- McCainSpace (John McCain relaunches his social media effort)
- Battlefront (new effort from Bebo and Channel 4 aimed at inspiring teenagers to use the web "as a canvas for social change." Check it out here)
- Fly Virgin 'Entourage' (Virgin names a plane after the popular HBO series. Plus USA Today examines young men's changing perceptions of masculinity) (Variety)
- Open source textbooks (industry vets making textbooks free online) (Wired)
Posted on September 2nd, 2008 in youth, youth marketing | Comments Off
What it does
If you’re like most people out there, by the time you end updating all your social networking accounts, half your day is gone. If you’re trying to avoid this, then you should try out Ping.fm. This service (that just launched into public beta), will allow you to take care of updating all your social profiles in one go. Just update your status through one of the many ways the site lets you, and they’ll make sure all your accounts are updated. This makes a task that could have taken you up to an hour be done in as quickly as a couple of minutes. The number of applications and sites that they cover is truly amazing. If you don’t find the social networks you are using on this site, then you’re using some obscure site on the net that no one knows about. I’m finding it hard to put into words how useful this service is. There is no reason why anyone shouldn’t be using this as the only way to update their status.
In their own words
“Use AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, WAP, iPhone/iPod Touch, SMS or E-mail and let Ping.fm relay your message to a multitude of social networking sites.”
Why it might be a killer
This makes perfect sense. It turns the hectic task of updating into a simple thing you can do through our phone.
Some questions
Why didn’t they think of this earlier? Will they support more networks in the future?
Link:
http://ping.fmOur Review:
http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/ping-fm-update-multiple-statuses
Posted on September 2nd, 2008 in youth, youth marketing | Comments Off
Recent research from WOMMA Member GFK Custom Research North America paints a very telling picture of what Americans are doing on their mobile devices: playing a lot of games. In fact, according to GFK/NOP research, 70 million US mobile customers are playing games on their phones, a number which includes both downloaded games and preloaded games. Additional research by the dotMobi consortium and AKQA delved into the mobile internet habits of Americans and Britons alike, and found that of the 1,65
Posted on September 2nd, 2008 in youth | Comments Off
How many mobile owners use them to game?
Posted on September 1st, 2008 in youth, youth marketing | Comments Off
Everyone knows what a jeans ad should look like, it really hasn't changed much since Levi's and that dude in the launderette. The new Wrangler campaign 'We Are Animals' is different and it's dif