Do marketing to the young audience have to be so complex or difficult?
Since I’m born in 1983, I’m proud to call myself a member of the Generation Y population. A generations basically born digitally injected to everything from mobile phones, internet, videogames and all kinds of new digital and electronically devices. And thanks to this we get the feeling having unlimited access to all kinds of information, mostly through the web. Our ability to multitasking far extend previous generations, and nothing seems impossible! We value our individuality, when we at the same time have the means and more options today for finding groups and communities of liked-minded. We collaborate in new ways to gain the bigger mass (society/world), which in turn gain us back.
Another word for this generation is Millennials. I previous wrote about this after watching CBS 60 minutes talk about the rising changes those will do to the corporate world. One of the things they discussed was how the millennials have been raised believing “they are the most important person in the world”… I consider them half right. Its hard to generalize. People in every generation think to highly of themselves, and other believe in collaboration and helping others first hand. But must those two be total opposites? Just my speculation, but through new ways to communicate, organize and work my generation will be more effective, efficient and united than previous generations. The old folks might not always see or understand how we work, but things definitely are changing. Some critics may even speak up, claiming this change ether is fictions and dreams or how it will lead to a unstructured, inefficient and even breakdown for businesses and society as a whole. Comparison to 70s hippies, and 80s trash style and how its just a phase “we will grow out of”. That eventually we will shape up, and stand in-line in social and corporate bureaucratic hierarchy like our parents and grand parents. Things will be as they always been….
But this is bigger than just us is the change in the work place. Entrance of the Wiki Workplace affect everyone and we, the Net generation have a huge advantage here:
“Competitive pressures, meanwhile, are making organizations leaner and more agile, more focused on consumer, and more attuned to dynamic competitive strategies. This means firms are less hierarchical in structure and decision-making authority than they used to be. But it also means that they will be less likely to provide lifelong careers and job security, and more in need of continuous reorganization to maintain or gain completive advantage.
And the same time, the nature of work itself is changing. Work has become more cognitively complex, more team-based and collaborative, more dependent on social skills, more time pressured, more reliant on technological competence, more mobile, and less dependent on geography.
To add further fuel to the fire, a new demographic is arriving in today’s workplace that cannot imagine a world without Google or mobile phones. The Net Gen has experienced these inventions and breakthroughs as part of their birthright, unlike earlier generations who have had to adapt or acclimatize to instant messaging and the iPod.”
- Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics.
Now lets get to my initial point with this post, marketing to my generation. What inspired me was an article over at Search Engine Watch labelled: Avoiding Online Missteps with Generation Y and Millenniums. The main point to me is simplicity, functionality and skipping all unnecessary shit. Just cause we are young and like new fancy things, we still have priorities on what’s important. Because we have so many sources of input, receiving tons of messages at the same time, our patience and time to process the information is very limited. Things must work for us, or we’ll find another services that does the job. Facebook have become a huge social network (even so big here in Sweden that research suggest employees quit if the company ban access to Facebook at work), not for its flashy fancy design, but functionality and simple interface, among other things. Another great example from the Wiki Workplace is not to try to create a social platform or work tool and then expect us to simply start using it. And that goes not just for our generation, but older as well.
Maybe I just speak for myself when I believe my generations is born critics. The closeness to the web and all information in the world fuel this. Traditional advertising with a push message doesn’t work the same as older generation. We know we have more choices and close at hand too. The same problem for the older generation with changes in corporations structures occur here were we don’t accept things being push to us. WE choose when, how and what! We move, act, develops and live in such a high speed market research becomes old even before its began. What can we gain from buying this service or product? We changes Brands favourites like underwear’s. And patience with corporations and people in power are very thin. If something bother us we speak up, and that is with force and power! We know we can change the world, cause its our world we will eventually take.
We were borned with the web, blogs, search engines, wikis, social communities and instant messaging. And this change in culture, communication and connecting is spreading through the whole society and corporate world. We already live with all the tools that eventually will be standard in businesses. We’re living in tomorrow, which will be jesterday the next day. To start your marketing campaign, understand us, how we live and think. It isn’t as complicated as you might think.
