Reaching the hearts and minds of the British Youth is almost tantamount to finding the holy grail of consumer branding. For not only does the “youth market” include increasingly older and younger age groups, but the brands targeting it dare to play at the cutting-edge of style.
In the past two weeks, new reports have sought to enlighten us about youth behaviour. The conclusions in Mintel’s report come as no surprise to anyone who survived adolescence. Young people like to go out at night and spend a great deal on drinking – incredible. By contrast, last week’s report by Pearlfisher is an attempt to look beyond the present to anticipate the market’s future needs (DW 17 November).
Pearlfisher’s The Night Mode of the Future report, compiled with the Henley Centre, is based on a think tank made up of influential figures in youth, leisure and culture, such as Red or Dead founder Wayne Hemingway, international DJ Chris Liberator and youth research specialist Terry Watkins. The approach was based partly on the belief that quantitative youth surveys serve to tell us little more than we already know, as evidenced by the Mintel report.
“The idea is to get a couple of steps ahead of the game, rather than the usual research model, which is frequently described as looking in the rear-view mirror,” says The Henley Centre Consultancy chief executive officer Paul Edwards. “The sort of young people who lead trends fundamentally don’t want to be involved in research. If you wanted to talk to them you’d have to go to Bar Italia at 3am every night for a month. What we did was talk to a deliberately small group of opinion leaders who are in touch with these people and who are also responsible for setting trends.”
The report concludes that design must be at the centre of marketing strategies for brands that want to attract the young and, as importantly, the young at heart.
However, the groundswell of anti-establishment, anti-capitalist, anti-brand, anti-marketing feeling among this group is well documented. Without question this age group has a sophisticated understanding of marketing and design, but it also provides us with the activists who brought havoc to New York, Prague and London this year. Witness what the June marchers did to McDonalds, one of the world’s greatest exercisers of marketing muscle. Clearly only the extreme end of youth is moved to trash burger bars, but it is also clear that young people distrust the whole ethos that makes marketing work.
“You have to hide the marketing hand,” says Garrick Hamm, creative director at Williams Murray Hamm, which recently designed packs for Boots The Chemists’ clubbing cosmetics range Trash and premium packaged spirits brand Wildbrew, both aimed at young consumers.
“You have to make sure that you don’t end up with a product that is over-designed or over-marketed because [young consumers] will sniff it out immediately. You have to make sure that your product doesn’t look like it has come from a designer’s studio. These people are exposed to so much more marketing than previous generations that they spot things much more quickly,” Hamm says.
So on one hand, designers have to acknowledge young people’s marketing literacy and, on the other, be sensitive to their prejudices, while not being too clever or patronising. Oh, and take into account that they have the attention span of amnesiac gnats.
The Pearlfisher report points out that young consumers are ever-more fickle. “Higher boredom factors and shorter attention spans will drive desire for ever-new and fresh brand offers. Brands that fail to innovate constantly will be left behind as consumers expect and demand new experiences,” it says.
Hamm agrees: “It is a very transient market, products have very short life-cycles and those that don’t have very short design lifecycles.” WHM’s approach is to create identities that are adaptable enough to be refreshed when necessary, which can be as much as every six to nine months depending on the product category. “Don’t choose a thought that cannot be changed without losing the original idea. Know that you are going to have to refresh the design and build that in to your thinking from the start, rather than going with something that relies too strongly on a particular look,” Hamm advises.
He claims that designs for both Wildbrew and Trash are based on this approach. The former is the most overt in that its animal print livery can move from leopard to zebra print without compromising the connection with wild animals.
While the rapidity with which youth-oriented products come and go – both in and out of fashion and in and out of existence – is well recognised, conversely many genres are extremely enduring. The Henley Centre’s Edwards comments: “Jeans, soap operas and fizzy drinks remain very popular. Okay, so the brands within them have cycles of popularity, but the categories have a lasting appeal for young people. They appreciate authenticity, quality and heritage.”
Edwards cites Coca-Cola as a youth brand with just that type of endurance. He advises designers to think carefully before playing around with the design for such “great” brands. “If you are given the equivalent of a Coke, don’t assume that you need to change it for the sake of changing it. Great care should be taken with brands like that,” he says.
However, he concedes that the multitude of brands can’t boast the same credentials and that, in today’s climate, it is all but impossible to create the equivalent, which means that most are stuck with having to be somewhat chameleon-like. His best advice when approaching this audience is: “Do not take yourself too seriously.”
Who said qualitative research didn’t have an element of stating the obvious?
Youth facts
48% of 15to 19-year-olds go to the pub at least once a week
91% of 15to 19-year-olds go to a pub, club, disco or rave
22% of 15to 19-year-olds go to a club, disco or rave at least once a week
90% of 11to 19-year-olds agree that they enjoy hanging out with their friends
73% of 11to 19-year-olds agree that they love going to the cinema
11% of 11to 19-year-olds are members of a youth club
53% of 11to 19-year-olds are members of any club
Source: Youth TGI, BMRB 1999
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