Secrets of Advertising to Gen Y Consumers. Aiden Livingston
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Our aptitude toward instant gratification, and demanding nature will only be amplified in future generations, such as Gen Z: Imagine how someone born in 2005 will view the world in 20 years. No doubt I will have to spend time explaining to them why before MP3s we had to buy CDs and store them in a giant binder that resembled the sign-in book at Ellis Island in both its size and seemingly random nature of its entries.
Appealing to Gen Y and having them embrace your product can actually hugely affect the overall market perception of your product and your brand in general.
4. The Trickle-up Effect
It is also noteworthy that although earlier generations may not expect or demand the same level of innovation from companies, they certainly appreciate the innovations. It is not a matter of choosing to market to Gen Y at the peril of losing customers and potential clients from other age ranges. In fact, quite the opposite, the innovations needed to reach and appeal to Gen Y actually charm all generations.
Just because older generations grew up in a world where lack of technology made many of the new marketing avenues impossible, doesn’t mean they don’t see the value in it. For instance, Apple has employed many new marketing techniques and has had great success establishing themselves in the minds of Gen Y; I can proudly say this book was written on a MacBook Air. However, the advertisements Apple uses to appeal to younger consumers also has a poignant effect on older generations. Many of my Gen Y friends’ parents own MacBooks and love them. Not only because MacBooks work well, but also because of what owning a Mac says about you to other people. It screams young and hip, and let’s face it, the young and the hip aren’t the only ones trying to project that image. In reality, Baby Boomers seem more susceptible to the need to appear young and hip than their kids do.
Appealing to Gen Y and having them embrace your product can actually hugely affect the overall market perception of your product and your brand in general. This in turn gives you a huge advantage in not just reaching Baby Boomers, but having a heavy influence on whether or not they actually purchase your product.
Furthermore, one thing most people fail to consider is how large of an impact Gen Y has over their parents’ purchases. Gen Y prides itself on being able to “research” and deduce what is the best purchase to be made. We go to online forums, read reviews, ask our friends, and look over numerous other sources of information before finally making what we believe is the most informed decision.
Perhaps even more tenacious than our research habits is our propensity for bragging about what smart consumers we are. We don’t do all that work for nothing; if nobody knows how brilliant we are, what is the point of being brilliant at all? Unlike a tree falling in the woods, we insist on being heard.
As a result most Baby Boomer parents pained with the decision of a new purchase typically consult their Gen Y kids. It is a beautifully symbiotic relationship; we get to flex our cognitive muscles and our parents get to shrug the responsibility of having to make a difficult decision in a marketplace that is flooded with confusing choices.
5. The Ones Pulling All the Strings
Most people tend to underestimate the influence Gen Y has over their parents. However, they forget the different dynamic that exists between Baby Boomer parents and their Gen Y kids. It is much different than the relationship the Baby Boomers had with their parents. Most of Gen Y talks to their parents regularly; I talk to my mom almost daily.
Moreover, much of Gen Y still lives with their parents: A practice I don’t particularly condone, but nonetheless it has become more common than not. It is not uncommon for even the oldest of Gen Y, now 27, to still be milking the parental cash cow. Many get their names on advanced college degrees before getting their name on an apartment lease.
However, even the members of Gen Y who do manage to move out remain very close to their parents, they talk frequently, and still spend a lot of time together. Most even still vacation with their parents and not just out of obligation. The reason is more so than any generation before it: Gen Y and their parents are often good friends. It is because of this closeness that Gen Y has a huge impact over their parents’ purchasing decisions. So by marketing to and attracting Gen Y customers you will actually be having a huge impact on Baby Boomers’ purchasing power as well. Those two groups combined constitute a majority of all the purchasing power in North America.
Ultimately the main reason to learn to market to Gen Y is because they are the future. Like it or not, a threshold has been crossed and there is no going back. Companies have the choice to learn and restructure accordingly now, while Gen Y is still relatively young and still hasn’t grown into its full potential, or choose to wait. The problem is that, as with learning anything new, it takes time, so you can take steps now to learn and adapt, or linger until the future makes your old model totally invalid and then struggle to try to catch up to the competition, which most likely won’t be possible.
Gen Y’s ideas don’t simply represent a new method in doing business with them, as much as how business will be done in the future. After all, the old techniques for marketing were fine in the early part of the twentieth century, since the reach to the market and methods were limited by technology. However, these days methods are limited only by the limits of the companies own imaginations and their sense of innovation in exploring this exciting new frontier.
At the end of the day, using outdated methods when newer methods are available at a lower cost and greater efficiency, is not only foolish it is dangerous; like storing meat on the windowsill when you have a perfectly good refrigerator. You might be able to get away with it for a little bit, but eventually it will catch up with you.
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The Rise and Fall of Traditional Marketing
Most regard traditional marketing with the reverence you would grant a religion, as though it has been around forever and will continue on unchanged well into the future. The truth is traditional marketing techniques most advertisers rely on have only really been in practice for less then 100 years, with a majority of the practice having only been standardized and perfected within the last 50 years. Perhaps since people tend to mistakenly believe that traditional advertising has existed for so long, they are likely to cling to the principles of traditional advertising when crafting their marketing campaigns and budgets.
However, Gen Y is all but immune to many of these traditional techniques. To actually reach Gen Y, companies must use new and innovative techniques. In many ways the rise of these traditional marketing methods from obscurity to the golden standards is being mirrored by the rise of modern advertising techniques. So it is important to learn the history of traditional marketing, if you are to understand why and how advertising will change in the future.
What is traditional marketing? Essentially, traditional marketing is paid ads being shown on billboards, in newspapers, in magazines, or in catalogs. Paid ads can also be aired between programs on television and on the radio. When you hear it put in plain English, it is almost remarkable how uncreative and unexciting the traditional advertising model sounds. Especially since most people in the advertising industry pride themselves on being creative people, but let’s face it: Following this format is about as creative as throwing a sheet over yourself on Hallowe’en and going as a ghost.
It is also important to note with all the formats listed in this chapter as traditional marketing, virtually none of them have any chance at reaching a member of Gen Y.
1. Billboards
The oldest of the advertising techniques is billboard advertising. In fact, as early as in Egyptian times merchants used signs to try and draw more customers to their business; though the current form of billboard advertising we all think of when we consider the concept of outdoor advertising is pretty far removed from hanging a sheet of papyrus paper on a wall announcing mummification services. Therefore, it is safe to say the actual practice of billboard advertising used today was developed much later.