Poor practises
* Prevent consumers from cancelling (agh!) @ Susan Abbott
* Youth trust - the 6 ways brands abuse it and lose it
* Change your values. Lego failed to update its brand values when communicating with a more modern gender issue-savvy audience.
* You took your consumers for granted or assumed they were stupid (eg Disney)
* Airlines. “Here’s an interesting twist on one of our favorite issues: fees. On Tuesday, Continental said, effective immediately, it would waive first-checked-bag fees for passengers who use the credit cards co-branded by the airline and Chase bank.” @WSJ

Challenges
* How to build loyalty into e and m-commerce @ Ecommerco
* How do metrics such as ARPU impact customer loyalty? See also viral marketing & NPS @ Dena Global
* How do you create customer loyalty? @ Infomean

Benefits
* Social Media & Customer Loyalty (Video) & Customers Rock
* Loyal customers give referrals @ FirstBestorDifferent
* The impact of Customer Advocacy @ JMacdonald

Advice
* How can Vodafone increase customer loyalty?
* Focus on consumer behavior not their words @ Brand Strategy Insider
* Insights from the Loyalty Expo 2008 @ Yastrow
* Branding - the way to consumer loyalty. “The average consumer is hit with 1800 marketing messages every day in the offline world alone. This means his personal spam filter works overtime to keep out the barrage of advertisements that he does Online Flowers and Cakes to India Article providing information on Indian flowers and cakes Starting Out On eBay” @ Ecommerco
* Building trust and trustworthiness. (See my post on the 3 ways brands build trust) When we interviewed youth on the street we found that 52% trusted their handset brand, while only 27% trusted their mobile operators (data from the mobileYouth report). Check out this video for some insights.
* Loyalty can be measured and developed.
* Can promotional items be used to increase loyalty? “In general, it’s far easier to keep an existing customer than it is to attract a new one. Cultivating a long-term relationship with your customers is an important part of doing business. After all, it’s your return customers who provide close to 80% of your annual sales and business.” @ Abestpost
* Brands that connect with millenials @ Millenial Marketing
* BMW’s customer journey @ Netpromoter

On Loyalty Schemes
* Loyalty Schemes? Worth the Bother? @Jim Donovan
* Study Identifies Loyalty Scheme Winners in an Economic Downturn @ CustomerThink
* Doing Your Homework before Beginning a Loyalty Card Program@ Abestpost

Technorati Tags: customer loyalty, loyalty, churn, word of mouth, net promoter score, viral

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.

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

* 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

- 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)

“There is no standard for how much a teacher puts on there or not, some teachers use it, some don't, and some use it inconsistently. If the school would make some practical rules about [its] use I think it would help every student and keep them informed and on top of their homework and classes.”