It's hard to achieve brand loyalty with any generation, but especially with Millennials. I'm sure that I don't need to make the case for why creating brand loyalists is important, but two essential reasons boil down to: 1) If you create loyalists when they're young, your sales trajectory and pass-along has a longer lifespan; 2) As anyone reading up on modern brand building probably already knows, the power of one passionate consumer combined with spiffy amplification tools (social media) can translate into thousands more customers hearing about your brand based on recommendation. Still, pervasive noise in our culture makes this much harder to achieve and "experts" tell us we've engendered a highly fickle batch of individuals – drug of choice? Choice. Like every generation in turn, Gen Y is increasingly distracted. The New York Times, Business Week and New York magazine all devoted articles within the past few weeks to our national attention deficit: the un-doings caused by multi-tasking in manifest digital forms, and the resulting shift advertisers must take toward leveraging social media influencers. Maybe you don't remember the good old days - when people shopped by brand, and purchase decisions were driven by the long-term brand capital that premium names like Tide, Coke, Gerber and Chevrolet held for decades. The concept of broad "customer reviews" existed, but media hadn't yet created the right channel to unleash it.
Since I'm almost part of this generation (depending on how you define Gen X and Gen Y), I thought I would share my observations about what a meaningful brand engagement looks like and what it takes to create one with our generation.
Free and Immersive
Building brand capital requires time and patience and relentless, iterative successes. But in the fight to establish a product or service in the early stages, its critical to stick to a few key principles to get ahead and keep your competitors at bay. Not only must services and products over deliver on a promise – but most often they need to do it cheaply, or better yet - free. Chris Anderson's forthcoming book, "FREE" from Hyperion will brilliantly detail the idea – but the gist is that Millennials and Generation Y have grown up with transformative experiences online and in mobile, that provide tons of high quality entertainment, information and experiences for free. Well, free to consumers, and at reasonable rates to advertisers.
A few months ago I stopped by my PR firm's office in SF sporting some bold new sneaks – "Those are cool," said my (Gen X) friend Jen. "I know, I made them!" I bragged. Another powerful way to connect with Gen Y is by engaging us in the product development process. We were practically christened in digital media and have been able to create environments (second life, habbo, club penguin), personalize media (myspace, itunes, avatars) and even design our own shoes (converse) and cars (scion). There are simple ways to achieve similar effects, for instance at 4INFO we offer the ability for consumers to customize the information they want to receive on their mobile phones – pretty easy. We found that once people are hooked on getting their free (ahem- "standard rate") headline news or sports alerts, we essentially created a branding opportunity for our partners to "sponsor" that content. The mobile phone experience by virtue of the fact that the phone is so personal, gives marketers an additional leg up because they become part of that highly personal, valuable and immersive experience for the user.
Marketing and Product Parity
I think many companies go wrong in trying to capture the hearts and minds of Gen Y is in mistaking a gimmick for a marketing strategy. Take the expensive failed efforts of Toyota back in 2000 when they created an entirely new marketing arm called Genesis to re-brand and sell lower-cost Celicas and MR2s to people under 30. Ultimately Genesis advertising may have over promised and the cars failed to capture the Gen Y imagination. Fast forward to a lesson learned 18 month later when Toyota re-emerged with the Scion. This time, product came first, and ads/marketing supported the strong execution around immersion and product customization. The full story in FastCompany gives details. Another way to look at this is simply by aligning your marketing promise such that you can over-deliver on your product. As much as marketing and advertising should accurately depict the product benefits or brand image, the medium has to support your messages too. It's no secret that the most widely adopted form of communication for Gen Y is SMS – so connecting with them in that communication environment is particularly smart.
Generation Y is more sophisticated and more critical when making decisions about what to buy or where to spend our time. By applying the core tenets of marketing to products and services today, and shedding the temptation to test out a gimmick, you're half way there. Yes, everything has changed and nothing has changed; so let this be a reminder to smart marketers that creating a brand affinity requires a quality product, a meaningful message and an appropriate delivery mechanism. The frosting is being able to add a little immersion or selection to the process, thereby creating even more passion for the process because hey, I MADE these shoes!
