Alternative marketing thinking

David Knox, Brand Manager Walmart team at P&G is a specialist in marketing to teens. Speaking at the IEG annual sponsorship conference, David presented a picture of Youth in the US and what smart marketers are doing to connect with this increasingly elusive demographic. The slides of his presentation are up on Slideshare.

Like our philosophy that urges brands to grow young, Dave and P&G have come to realize that Youth is not a demographic anymore, but a mindset. He believes that Generation Y is not an isolated demographic, but a group that can give marketers and advertisers a glimpse of how others will behave in the future.

Youth in America believe that stress is a way of life today. But they are optimistic about the future. Most believe that they can personally achieve the American Dream, of being simply happy, no matter what they do.
There is a we-volution taking place at the moment. With places like services like Kiva and Prosper leading the social lending change. Other examples of this phenomenon are Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers and UK based MyFootballclub, where 50,000 fans have come together to create a football club. Another example of this revolution is the community centred online apparel store Threadless, where anyone can submit a design or an idea, which is voted for by visitors of the site. Creators of the selected design then get a share of the sales.
For most young people lives have become completely digital. Their computer is the No 1 item they cannot live without. And they live a connected life, either through their computer or their mobile phone.
Being socially conscious is on the rise among the young. And brands like Product(Red) and
Innocent are examples of brands that operate in this space.Media for the young mindset is everything around them. With community, self expression and personalisation being the key.

Marketing to youth according to Dave is all about entertainment, authenticity, giving up control, recalibrating marketers tolerance to risk and using the power of networks.

Jones Soda is a good example of a brand that has given up control, by letting users create their own bottle labels.

One of the biggest shifts that’s part of Dave’s presentation is the role of companies that own and manage these brands. He says companies need to think like Venture Capitalists, who bet on many ideas and are willing to have a blockbuster or two and many failures.

Of the other examples he quotes are P&Gs own, BeingGirl portal that’s now operational in 27 countries. Youth travel site STA Travel . Tween Fiction series MacKenzie Blue, that was created by a buzz marketing group for Harper Collins. Nike’s work with graffiti artists and their ID store.

Nigel Hollis at the Millward brown Blog has an interesting post on how a small student protest on Facebook forced a bank, HSBC, to climb down on a rate increase. The point he makes is not so much that some 6,500 protesters on a social networking site could force a bank to do a climb down. His team at Millward Brown did a quick poll in their offices among new graduates, which showed that only 4% of them had heard of the protest through Facebook itself. While almost nine times as many - 35% - had heard about it through traditional news media. The rest, in the majority, were unaware of the issue. So while the Facebook revolt was a catalyst for the wider news coverage, it was the latter, the traditional media outlets, which really caused HSBC to take notice. Nigel concludes that social networks are a great place to seed marketing campaigns, but to get them to flourish you will need to add a good dose of traditional media coverage. We think there is another little thing that maybe worth noting. That anything that happens on Facebook right now is worth talking about. Just like Second Life had all the buzz a few months, right now it’s Facebook time. Read the whole post here.

One of the harsh realities of living on the web is that companies can no longer talk at their customers. As Walmart recently found out when they launched the Roommate Style Match group on Facebook. Some 1,000 members joined. The idea was to market dorm furnishings to college-age audiences, but several hundred vehement comments surfaced about Wal-Mart’s labor practices, hijacking the brand’s message. BusinessWeek recently ran a day long session with IDEO and a bunch of marketing managers to discuss how best to use social media as part of the overall branding message. The article talks about a blogger northfaceguru.com, who complained about a fake North Face fleece jacket bought on eBay. Today, readers exchange anecdotes about North Face products on his blog—and, he says, the company’s counterfeit team points customers to his site, turning a potential brand-damaging consumer into an ally. The problems that brand will face with real people writing real stories of brands online is a big one indeed. Even in India, sites like MouthShut.com and ComplaintsBoard.com have become channels where people openly discuss issues or great experiences they have had with brands. Searching for Eureka Forbes on Google bought up real user views from users on mouthshut and complaintsboard. Want to work in an hot, emerging industry? How about one that helps brands manage their image online? Link to the BusinessWeek article.

Even as banks chase the benefits of higher share prices, innovation and better efficiencies, one problem of having big, global advertising campaigns, The Banker Magazine feels, is these campaigns very rarely affect relevant to local issues. Hayes Roth, chief marketing officer at Landor Associates, speaking for the article says that there is research to prove that most retail banking customers around the world are largely unimpressed with grand advertising claims about global resources. These claims tend to be irrelevant to their personal banking needs and potentially even negative, implying ‘too big to pay attention to me’. The article ends with an unwitting incident that occurred to Goldman Sachs recently. On February 22, the Financial Times ran a front-page story on how the co-presidents of Goldman Sachs each pocketed about $53m in cash and stock following a record 2006 performance. A few pages on, the bank ran a large advertisement about how it was helping to develop capital market instruments to fund immunisation programmes in 70 of the world’s poorest countries. Read the full article.

The open source community has shifted the ground for marketers one more time. With a new plugin for Firefox browsers that lets people view art, in the place of online banners. If you have been a Firefox user, you would have tried out a few plugins yourself. These are third party add ons that help improve browsing experience. There are addons for downloading YouTube videos, page previewers, ones that let you see the page before you click on a tab, dictionary and search engine plug ins and more. Now, artist and geek Steve Lambert has added AddArt, a plugin that replaces banners with art, on computers that have the plug installed on them. Since the plugin is installed on the users machine, there’s little that advertisers or banner companies can do to change anything. There are over 50,00,000 Firefox users in the world who are some of the most connected and opinionated people, losing them could be a real problem for marketers and advertisers.

Maxed Out, a scathing documentary that looks at America’s debt crisis promises to do what Supersizeme did to McDonalds and other fast food companies. Ridiculing the Master Card Logo, the movie, according to the website takes viewers on a journey deep inside the American style of debt, where things seem fine as long as the minimum monthly payment arrives on time. The film covers the life of the ordinary American and works its way up all the way to the White House. It documents how the modern financial industry really works, explains the true definition of ‘preferred customer’ and tells viewers why the poor are getting poorer while the rich keep getting richer. Hilarious, shocking and incisive, Maxed Out paints a picture of a national nightmare which is all too real for most of us.”

How many times have you had to wade through many layers of automated voice help on customer support lines, knowing that a real person could solve your problem in seconds? Get Human project is a consumer movement to improve the quality of phone support in the US and other countries. This free service is run by volunteers and is powered by consumers who demand high quality phone support from the companies and services they use. Started by Paul English, a Boston based customer advocate and
entrepreneur, GetHuman has some of the largest American companies on its website database to help customers to reach real people at online service desks to solve their problems. On similar lines, 321 helps customers to keep track of all their customer service interactions.

Our newsletter has carried stories of how customers are getting more and more irritated with banks and the kinds of various fees they charge. The Daily Mail, UK has reported that a customers sent bailiffs to collect dues that he felt his bank owned him. When Royal Bank of Scotland refused to refund the £3,400 in charges, he sent in debt collectors who seized four computers, two fax machines and a till filled with cash. Instances like this, as odd as they may be, is an indication that there is a place for a new brand of banks that promise low fees or no fees, complete transparency and a whole new business ethic.

2007 is well into its first month, but still a good time to look into what the months ahead hold. Nancy Kelly the guide to all things credit at About.com has these predictions. Increased fees, reduced fees, more products for kids, easier transactions and more. Elsewhere ABC educates credit card users on how to get out of the debt hangover.

How often have you called into a bank’s Help Desk and encountered a bunch of pre-recorded messages, even when you want to talk to a real human being? The problem may not be not as acute in India as it is in high cost markets like the US. So people driven initiatives like these are still to be seen here. GetHuman, high quality customer advocacy for customer service, is a service that watches companies and their telephone support service. Get Human has a grading system (A for best to F for worst) for 500 of America’s top companies; you’ll love this, shortcuts on how to get a human help to sort out your problem. The service even has a consulting division that will help companies balance their automated and human ratio on call in help lines.