UK TRIBES IN RESEARCH MAG
The piece offers a really nice overview of all the work over the years for Channel 4, as we've profiled youth culture, mapped change and made sure all of this is as relevant as possible to brands and media. It touches on everything from the TGI fusion work to the video blogging and, of course, our detailed, super colourful breakdown of (currently) 23 youth tribes.
Stay tuned for more from UK Tribes later this year.
Loving Local for the Newspaper Society
We have just finished a project for the Newspaper Society looking at the impact of the recession, the recent change of government, and the continued growth of social media and mobile technology on local community, local life and the role of media.
We spoke to almost 5,000 UK adults about a range of areas including community life, media consumption, the role of different media channels on purchase decisions, and the economy.
We incorporated questions from previous Newspaper Society research projects and therefore were able to benchmark change over the last few years; we also used lots of new metrics.
Since 2008, when the Newspaper Society conducted its Local Matters research, more people feel safe in their area, and there is a greater sense of pride in communities. It would appear that despite the recession and cuts to public services people still have a positive outlook when it comes to their area; unsurprisingly, scores on the state of the nation are down across the board compared to three years ago.
Another interesting finding is the acceptance of brands in communities. 84% of respondents said they are more likely to buy from brands that give something back to the local community. This offers a really good way for brands to positively connect with people in a space that they are passionately engaged with.
Supermarkets have being doing this for years with voucher schemes like Sainsbury’s Active Kids, Tesco For Schools, Morrison’s Let’s Grow and Waitrose Community Matters, where shoppers use tokens to vote on which local initiative receives a donation each month.
Other brands are also expanding their involvement in this area with the likes of Nike setting up a football training centre in Soweto and KFC mending potholes. VW’s Fun Theory is using fun to help reduce speeding, increase recycling and encourage people to be more active by using stairs instead of escalators. The Newspaper Society’s Loving Local research shows there is an acceptance and appetite for this kind of involvement. All that’s needed now is for more brands to get involved.
Youth Marketing Strategy, 2011
We were lucky enough to spend time at the Reach Students' Youth Marketing Strategy Conference yesterday, held at the London School of Pharmacy.
There were 13 expert speakers in all, with our client Channel 4 among the interesting mix. Channel 4 talked about the latest video blogging wave of UK Tribes, and talked through some key themes we identified in modern youth culture. It was great to see such enthusiasm for the work, with lots of laughs (in the right places!) and plenty of questions at the end.
If you’re interested in learning more about UK Tribes then you can catch-up with it all here
Luke Mitchell of Reach Students kicked proceedings off with some great youth marketing‘do’s and don’ts’, and set the scene for what turned out to be some consistent, emerging themes in youth marketing.
Below is a non-exhaustive list of what we took from the sessions we saw...
Do Your Research!
Good news for us, then!But as researchers we need to ensure we’re keeping up with this audience and using techniques and methodologies that suit them, not us. Tried and tested research methods can be fine, but we do need to be thinking one step-ahead; are we ensuring that our research methodologies are still relevant to this audience? Are we talking to them in the right language (more on this in a sec)?
The Right Language
Especially applicable to brands, and a reinforcement of the need for research, but the way we talk to a youth audience cannot be underestimated. This shouldn’t be ignored by us in the research industry either; if we want young participants to talk to us openly, we need to be sure they’re comfortable and clear about what we’re asking, and the way we ask it.
Another interesting approach to this issue, and one we’ve used many times for UK Tribes, is deploying a citizen journalist-style method to youth projects; having young people talk to other young people, in an environment and fashion that feels totally natural. As Emily Kortlang of Fallon said in her presentation ‘How To Go From The First Date To Falling In Love (and avoid promiscuity...)’, we need to avoid “Dad on the dancefloor” scenarios in research!
Do find advocates
Find is the key word. There’s a tendency to assume that just because a person's young, and your product/brand is within the realm of youth, that a ‘young person’ is a perfectly suited brand advocate. Obviously this couldn’t be further from the truth, and with young consumers being as brand savvy as they current are, it could also be a particularly damaging assumption.
Find young people who love what you do; arm them with what they love, ensure this is shareable and exclusive, and make sure they’re happy.
Don’t fear the haters
Young consumers will respect you more if you have some conviction in what you’re doing. A good example of this is the Jack Wills brand. While some absolutely hate it, those that love it, LOVE IT. We found in our last wave of UK Tribes that Jack Wills among the Rah tribe was a significantly strong social glue, leading to an ‘us against them’ mentality. In short, the fact it’s a polarising brand seems to be its strongest point.
If you’re neither loved or hated, you’re stuck somewhere in the middle, which is probably quite a boring place to be...
Don’t forget face-to-face
It’s quite easy to get carried away in the world of digital, but there’s still a lot of interesting debate to suggest that digital's strongest use is facilitating discussion about offline ‘things’.
For brands this could be anything from giving them free stuff, doing experiential campaigns or running events. If all planned correctly, and knowing in advance what youth consumers like to pass on and share, then they’ll have plenty of content to populate all their online channels with - and chances are this content will be about your brand.
Do be authentic
Youth can spot fakers very easily, so you need to show that you’re doing something for them and not just jumping on a bandwagon. A lot of brands are investing in grass roots youth culture (Converse buying the 100 Club, for example) to show that they’re in it for the greater good, as opposed to exploiting it.
Are post-recession youth less loyal to brands?
The need to identify value means they’re possibly less inclined to stick to something tried and tested, instead moving onto something cheaper - or more expensive if it represents better value. We’ve found in our UK Tribes work that it’s quite cool to be a bit frivolous these days.
All in all, a very promising debut for the Youth Marketing Strategy Conference. Take a look at http://www.reachstudents.co.uk/ for more information.
We’ll hopefully see you there next time.
Our "Social City" work in Research mag
Nice to see our "Social City" project for Metro getting some coverage in Research mag, courtesy of an interview with Metro research director, Katherine King. She talks about how the study looks to establish if there's a symbiotic relationship between how people use the city and social media; and the innovative methods we used to research 16 and 17-year-olds