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07.01.2009

“HartBeat” is The Hartman Group's FREE online newsletter, providing insight, analysis, information and strategy to give business leaders the knowledge and vision to build sustainable brands.

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Our only guideline is that civility rules. Click on the comment button at the top or bottom of the HartBeat article and let’s talk!

This week's Hart-to-Hart:

In response to our Private Label Blues Hartbeat, reader A. Reynolds reflected on the general tendency to treat private label as a category than a complex entity.

“Your description of the industry’s traditional perception of private label as a “homogeneous, generalizable organism thriving amid a standardized ecosystem” struck me as spot on. I’ve been a loyal reader of Private Label Buyer for some time now, while they are great for news, I have never gotten the sense that they understand the true complexities lurking within private label. The more I think about it, I am of the opinion that private label is much more than a category or channel, it’s more like everything.”

I agree with Ms. Reynolds. And it’s precisely the “everything” nature of private label that has made many CPG brand managers increasingly nervous as the private label sales continue to gain marketshare.

– Harvey Hartman

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Kids Don’t Follow, Kids Don’t Twitter

The Truth about Teens, Social Networking and Technology

“Kids don’t follow, what you’re sayin'
We can’t hear, what you say
Not tomorrow, not today” – Paul Westerberg

Listen to this week's HartBeat as a Podcast >>

We’ve been encountering a lot of misconceptions recently regarding the subject of teens, technology and social networking. Namely, there seems to be this widespread belief that in order to keep one’s product, service or brand relevant in the future, it is mission critical to understand how teenagers are utilizing technology in social networking behaviors today. “So what’s the deal with Twitter…how can we leverage Twitter to keep in touch with teens and millennials?” is a near constant refrain in analyst and marketing arenas. But if you spend a serious amount of time and effort researching teens and millennials, you might be quite surprised at what you might learn.

Misperception #1: Teens and Millennials communicate with each other via Twitter

Reality: Most estimates suggest that teens and millennials comprise less than 5% of Twitter users. Nielsen data consistently shows that more than 40% of Twitter users fall into the 35-49 age bracket. Our own research suggests that there are two core groups of Twitter users:

1) a very small number of internet technology enthusiasts

2) a much larger group of adults who believe that Twitter is an important tool for a) gaining them professional credibility, b) getting them a better job, c) impressing their friends, or d) B to B communications

Then again, all of this talk about Twitter may well be moot. A recent report from Harvard Business School suggested 10 percent of the users are acounting for more than 90% of tweets. Meanwhile the folks at Neilsen found a near 60% attrition rate. From either direction the prognosis is not good.

Misperception #2: Email plays an important role in the daily lives of teens and millennials.

Reality: Teens use email for highly mundane tasks such as homework, registering for websites, and receiving files—many of the same things we adults use email for. While many adults are still enchanted with email—due in large part of the fact that we remember what communication was like in the postal era—teens have never shared the love. Teens and millennials are all about SMS/texting. And no, you shouldn’t try to communicate with them there. Teens need their space, and just as they resent their parent’s intrusions so, too, do they resent marketers invading their personal communication spaces.

Misperception #3: Teens are engrossed with utilizing technology to transform their lives and create cool software tools.

Reality: Today’s teens are no more interested in writing code than they were 20 years ago. True, Mark Zuckerberg was 20 when he founded Facebook, but Bill Gates and The Woz were also pretty young at the time too.

Technology tinkering is still a geek thing. All that has changed it that is now much more socially acceptable to admit we secretly adore geeks.

Misperception #4: Facebook is the new MySpace for teens.

Reality: Unclear.

While those under 24 do comprise more than 50% of all users, as of January 2009, they were growing at the relatively paltry rate of about 25% per year. Compare that with fastest growing segment (35-54), which witnessed a growth rate of 276%(!) and the question becomes much less interesting . What remains clear is that the dominant form of communication between teens and millennials occurs through their phones—be it voice, image, or, of course, SMS texting.

Misperception #5: We can impute important learnings about future behavior by studying the attitudes and behaviors of teens and millennials in their interactions with technology.

Reality: This is really the story here. To be certain, it is critical to study millennials to glean important information about how they are living, behaving—and in some cases shopping—at the moment, but it would be a critical blunder to assume that current beliefs and practices about internet and Twitter are a predictor of future life course events. For many decades social scientists have understood the weak relationship between adolescent attitudes, beliefs & practices and future life course behavior. In fact, as social development research suggests, many of the important life-course outcomes (employment, literacy, health, etc.) are better explainable by events occurring within one’s first 3-4 years of life.

But at a less theoretical and more common-sense level, most of us need only look within ourselves to realize that our adolescent ideas and behaviors are poor predictors—at best—of our current attitudes, beliefs and practices. Sure, you may still like The Rolling Stones—whom scientists have recently demonstrated are, in fact, better than The Beatles—but you’re also interacting daily with an entirely new world order of products, services and technologies that couldn’t have been imagined 20 to 30 years ago. Does the fact that you once wore a pukka shell necklace in high school back in ‘74 really explain your morning latte ritual?

Analysis

To be most clear, what we are suggesting is that it is critically important to understand teens and millennials from the perspective of contemporary marketing efforts. Likewise, it is also important to closely follow the social behaviors arising around recent developments in communications technology (voice, text, SMS, email, Internet, social network sites, etc.), though as the data tend to suggest, the important demographics for these technologies may skew much older than conventional thinking.

But it would be a most critical blunder to assume that because today’s teens and millennials “came of age” during the heyday of Web2.0 and the text message explosion, you can somehow glean important insight into their future lifecourse behaviors by understanding their interactions with these technologies today. In other words, resist the common temptation to think that you need clever viral marketing campaigns or Twitter blasts in order to convince today’s teens and millennials of your brand’s relevance.

As the nature of communications technology evolves, so too will the nature of communications marketing. Twitter may—or may not—prove a game changing advance (though we suspect the latter). The amount of money and resources devoted to advertising on Mobile devices is likely to explode in the coming months. And more than likely, none of these things will matter in 10 years as they will have been eradicated by as-of-yet unknown developments (remember the fax blasts?). Most importantly, though, whether today’s teens and millennials still use your brand in the future will have little to nothing to do with the recent flurry of viral marketing campaigns and Twitter blasts headed their way.

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