When building an advertising strategy, everyone knows it’s important to know your audience. The audience is constantly changing, however, and keeping up with it can be quite a challenge. That’s why I love it when someone goes out and does the work for me. On Advertising Age, Carol Phillips posted an article about what’s going on in current college students’ minds with regard to advertising, commodities, services and brand recognition. As a college professor, she has a great opportunity to observe these so-called “Millennials” in their natural habitat. Her top 10 list of observations is a helpful lesson in what we don’t know about what they don’t know.
Here’s a quick overview:
1. College students are not the target for most products. Apparently these kids think everything that makes life more convenient was made just for them.
2. The average household income does not support a cleaning lady. I don’t know where the study comes from, but apparently most college students estimate that about 30% of households employ a maid service, while the actual figure is more like 5%.
3. There are more old people than young people. Living in a community dominated by 20-somethings causes college students to forget that 72% of the population is older than they are, and need lots of products that they don’t give a flying flip about.
4. Facebook is an advertising-supported, commercial service. See #1 – of course they believe it was made exclusively for their social benefit.
5. Service marketing is more than a latte with a smile. Most kids don’t realize that higher prices on certain products pays for the services they assume are free.
6. Retailers, not manufacturers, set the price. Manufacturers are more likely to get blamed for high prices or praised for low ones, while the retailer is overlooked.
7. It’s illegal for ads to lie. A high level of skepticism causes college students to disbelieve most blatant marketing efforts.
8. 98% of product placements are paid. See #7 – while blatant advertising is considered a lie, product placement in movies and tv shows is not considered advertising and is actually effective in creating brand affinity.
9. Mobile phones and iPods are new media. These items are used as communication tools rather than a new frontier in marketing, and so will reject advertisers’ efforts to use them for such, especially when it gets in the way of instant gratification.
10. Brands influence buying behavior. Just as they reject advertising, they also reject the idea that they buy based on brand rather than price, making them unaware of how many of their buying decisions actually are brand-driven.
So what does this mean? If part of your target market is 20-somethings, you’ve got to be clever, but you can also market to other demographics without too much fear about alienating the college students. These people are finding lots of ways to avoid advertising all together, the good and the bad.
During a lecture to a freshman design class about motion graphic design the other day, I asked the class what was the last tv commercial they remember watching, and what was it that made it stick in their mind. I got a few responses, but for the most part the class was silent. Someone spoke up and said that they never watched TV commercials since all their shows were TiVo’d. Why did this surprise me? Because I also use TiVo and fast-forward through commercials, but as an advertiser I often will stop and watch a spot that looks interesting, or one that I’ve heard about. As well, sometimes I still watch “live TV” on occasion and am subjected to the usual barrage of inescapable advertising. It caught me off-guard that they literally had eliminated television advertising from their lives.
It’s an important lesson to learn. Know your audience. Speak to them on their wavelength. If they hate advertising, don’t advertise – entertain. Create a friendly brand that does not come across as corporate or overbearing. Listen to your customers.
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Interesting ideas.