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.

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‘Gamification’ – it’s definitely been a top buzz word for 2011. Gaming has always been a big deal, but when social media took off, gaming just got bigger – apps on Facebook, smartphones, tablets etc. People are always connected and, quite a lot of the time, they’re playing a game. But why the need for ‘gamification’? Brands are being told they need to add gaming elements to their offerings – whether through apps, their websites or even their advertising – like McDonald’s have done in Stockholm.

Back in Jan 2011, I viewed a New MR online conference, which looked at the implications of gaming in market research. In our qualitative work this is often a feature of focus groups (ie, making brand mapping into a game, or brand personification tasks). When it comes to quant, we’ve been, um, ‘gamificating’ for years… Back in 2006, we launched the Find Your Tribe survey as part of our UK Tribes work for Channel 4 – segmenting the youth of the UK. In 2008, we gave the survey a make-over and it has seen over 70,000 entries, providing results for many brands on media and purchase trends among young people. The reason for its high completion rate was the gamification of the survey. Engaging, interactive and highly visual, it allowed users to embark on a journey, selecting their favourite brands/media/hobbies/music in a game format with the output at the end presenting the tribe they belonged to (and if they disagreed with the youth tribe they were assigned to they could disagree and let us know!). Gamification works particularly well with youth sectors and the Find Your Tribe survey saw high pass-on rates with most users who participated – inviting friends to take the ‘challenge’ and compare the tribes that they were aligned to.

A lot of our work is often youth orientated – MTV, Nickelodeon, Red Bull, Nuts, Kerrang! Etc, and when it comes to quant for these types of brands we always ensure that the look, feel and language of the surveys have a relevant feel. If it looks good, and is fun to take part in, the respondents will take time to participate – thinking through their answers and therefore providing us with deeper insight. Take Play Respond - a bespoke survey we made with a gamification feel for Viacom. It needed to be visually creative for a youth audience interested in art to take part, and from a quant perspective we added ‘design’ questions that allowed the user to create their own watch (rather like a game). This design element ensured that the respondents took their time over their watch creation, providing some great visual results to present. To make the challenge greater still, we were tasked were producing this in different languages for deployment across a range of markets.

While making sure the look and feel of a survey helps provide a gaming feel, the language used is also key. Gamification language in quant – especially to a youth audience – sees us often use terminology such as ‘guess’ or ‘challenge’, which the audience is familiar with and makes them think a bit harder about their choice of answer (they don’t want to be wrong!)

Let’s be honest, not a lot of young people actively want to take part in an online survey, but through our understanding of what makes them tick, gamification has proved to be a highly successful metric to ensure we get them to take part, think about their responses and perhaps even enjoy the experience!

Dos and Don’ts of gamification in quant surveys

Dos

• Keep it highly visual, interactive and engaging – if it looks nice and flows well people will take the time to answer the questions
• Use it for the right audience and topic, works great for a young audience who understand gaming terminology
• Think about using an ‘output’/answers screen at the end of the survey, whether it’s knowing how other people have answered certain questions or providing an end ‘result’ (ie like Tribes)

Don’ts

• Know your target audience - gamification isn’t for everyone – eg, obviously if you’re talking about a serious topic such as finance
• Don’t go overboard, it’s good to have some gaming terminology/aspects to the survey, but not every question needs it
• It shouldn’t be overtly ‘gamified’ – just subtle enough to draw an interesting slant to the way a question is worded; no one wants to be patronised!

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The Insight Show, 2011

Last week saw a few of Crowd DNA out and about, at Marketing Week’s Insight Show and News International and Haymarket’s The Big Tablet Debate.

The Insight Show at Kensington Olympia (London) proved an interesting one this year. We saw Spencer McHugh, Brand Director at Everything Everywhere, speak about T-Mobile’s hugely successful ‘Life’s for Sharing’ campaign, much of which has become a viral phenomenon. Some fairly awesome stats were presented, illustrating what the campaign has done for the brand, not only here in the UK, but across the world. The T-Mobile royal wedding in particular was a runaway success that exceeded all benchmarks and expectations.

We also saw Buzzback’s managing director, Martin Oxley, present ‘The Currency of ‘Cool’: Keeping up to date with teens by better understanding what’s hot’. Given our extensive work with the youth market, it was particularly interesting for us to see another agency’s take on researching teens. And they certainly took a different approach. Focusing on UK, US and Brazil, Buzzback wanted to understand what ‘cool’ means to teens, the imagery and emotions associated with ‘cool’, how it’s communicated, which brands are cool and the emotions that motivate teens and influence their behaviour. They used a quantitative methodology, surveying hundreds of teens in each market, using various complex analysis techniques to uncover patterns and insights. Here are some of the themes they identified:

What kind of imagery represents ‘cool’?

• US: big headphones, pop culture, music, images that communicate a sense of optimism and enthusiasm
• UK: similar imagery, but optimism and enthusiasm less significant, dangerous/adrenaline sports considered cool, also generally less consensus among UK teens as to what represents cool (our UK Tribes work would concur!)
• Brazil: lots of similarities, but technology and gadgets that enable them to connect with friends feature more than in US and UK

Using Language And Behaviour Profiling, an NLP technique, Buzzback identified six insights common across all markets:

• Teens focus on things not people
• Teens are interested in the big picture, not the details
• Feeling is the strongest sensory expression, followed by doing (see, hear etc are less important)
• Cool is about chosen conformity
• Teens are internally referenced
• It’s more important to be cool than not be uncool

How can you spot a ‘cool’ kid:

• UK: funny, popular, good looking, confident, trendy
• US: as above, but also talented and on a sports/cheer team
• Brazil: as UK, but deeper associations, such as being reliable and trustworthy, came through too

Which is cooler in the UK…?

• Texting (not talking)
• Kindle (not print books)
• Mac (not PC)
• Extreme sports (not traditional)

Conclusions:

• ‘Cool’ is a positive emotional excitement/interest/acceptance of things and people
• ‘Cool’ is defined by the individual, but influenced by the mainstream
• Fashion and technology brands are coolest
• ‘Cool’ can be communicated by brands by focusing on:
• All-encompassing, inclusive words, eg all, everyone, world
• Activities and feelings
• Similarities not differences
• Friends are king: never underestimate the power and influence of teens’ friends

So all in all, an interesting study, but we couldn’t help feeling that it would have benefited from a qualitative element to the methodology, firstly to help create some of the stimulus presented in the quant survey, and secondly to add further depth and explanation to the findings.

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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.

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We’re excited to finally start talking about the latest wave of UK Tribes, our ongoing youth research study for Channel 4. If you’re not up to speed on what we've done in the past, click here and pop back when you’re done...

We've been hard at work on this over recent months; working our way through around 500(!) video blogs from 50 young people, representing 22 of our youth Tribes. We’ve created a new page on the UK Tribes site to host the findings (www.uktribes.com/videoblogs), and are producing videos to encapsulate the key themes to emerge across the five topics we put to our participants: leisure, hopes & fears, gaming, identity and attitudes to a number of brands.

Scroll down for an introductory video and the first findings video, focusing on the hopes and fears of today’s youth. If you want to learn any more then do drop us an email at hello@crowdDNA.com. We’ll be glad to help.

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