Mobile Marketing for Gen Y

Gen Y, aka the Millennial generation, is the largest generation in U.S. history. Born primarily in the 80s and 90s, this group ranges from teens through mid-30s and is several million people larger than the Baby Boomer generation.

Accounting for roughly 26% of population and spending power that exceeds $200 billion (and spending influence that may double that), brands must learn a different approach to reaching Gen Y.

Target Gen Y Effectively

You can no longer buy attention, you need to earn it. Facing a constant barrage of brand messages, Gen Y has become masters at tuning it all  out. Although this group is very active on social networks, they rely heavily on word-of-mouth referrals made by members of their trusted community rather than marketing and advertising messages when making purchasing decisions.

“Not every young person across all age groups and gender differences is actively optimizing products and services to enable their social lives. A small group of young people sets out to discover social currency. We call them Change Agents. They are the 10% of the mobileYouth economy that influence the remaining 90%.” -MobileYouth

Monica O’Brien, in her post How to Market to Gen Y for OpenForum, provides an example. “A small start-up called CaptainU targets high school athletes with their college recruiting software. The company spent a year trying to market their company on Facebook with no success. Then, they offered internships to a small group of high school students, who started sharing the company’s fan page updates with friends. The CaptainU Facebook fan page went from 100 fans to nearly 2,000 fans within a month, all because they found a way to infiltrate the inner circle of teens they were targeting.”

CaptainU could have spent a fortune and many years shouting their brand benefits through a bullhorn, to no avail. What did work was giving something of value to the right group of influencers, then making it easy for them to share their brand experiences.

Let Them Tell the Brand Story. Gen Y wants to see themselves in your brand and be given ways to tell their own story. National marketing and advertising campaigns traditionally provide the context for their content — in other words, they seek to tell consumers how, when, where  to  use, interact with, and share their brand. Gen Y responds well when they are allowed to provide the context.

The smart folks at MobileYouth explain it like this: “Youth don’t buy stuff, they buy what stuff does for them.” The ‘what stuff does for them’ is the context. The physical and logical element of a brand (such as design, advertising and product features) is the content. Without context, content has no meaning. “Context is the story shared among youth about how the content is relevant in their lives. Without context a product is relegated to being one of the many options on the shelf to browse through with no social benefit attached to it.”

For example, Gen Y does not respond to soda brands that place TV ads depicting groups of age-appropriate friends enjoying a cold bottle, at least not the way it did for Boomers and Gen X. Both Red Bull and Jones Soda managed to find success by adding a strong dose of Gen Yers directly into their marketing mix.

From Fast Company: “Jones Soda Co. founder and CEO Peter van Stolk has his own secret ingredient. It has created buzz, produced 30% yearly revenue growth in a flat beverage market, drawn major distribution partners such as Starbucks and Target, and brought in $30 million in annual revenue. That ingredient: you. Virtually everything about a Jones Soda, from labels to flavors, comes from customers. That’s important because … the world wasn’t necessarily clamoring for another soda, even if it tastes like blue bubble gum. So how do you sell an unnecessary product? If you’re van Stolk, you hand the product over to customers.” Van Stolk says, “‘People get fired up about Jones because it’s theirs.”

Pinterest and PostSecret are two more wildly popular examples of inserting the consumer directly into the brand experience and allowing them to tell their own story.

Go Where They Go. They don’t watch live network TV. They are not influenced by the media. They interact within their social circles, texting and IMing and sharing YouTube videos. Like previous generations, they have a music scene (live), a sports scene (extreme), an art scene (tattoos), and a games scene (video). They also love a good cause –politics and the environment are favorites. Brands that have enjoyed good adoption by Gen Y have infiltrated these scenes with boots on the ground. Vans shoes sponsors international skateboarding tours, live music and extreme sports festivals, and posts skateboarding and surfing videos to YouTube. Mountain Dew hands out samples at surfing, skateboarding, and snowboarding tournaments; Mountain Dew, Oakley and Hurley ‘sponsor’ skateboards in popular video games. TOMS shoes gives away one pair of shoes for each pair purchased.

In the mobile ad world, campaigns that effectively target Gen Yers:

• have no barriers to sharing; enable the 10% to influence
• provide opportunities for creating original content, telling their own stories, and co-creating the brand
• offer experiences based on extreme sports, concerts, games, causes and other scenes enjoyed by Gen Y

Have you had success engaging Gen Y in mobile marketing campaigns? What have you found to be most effective?