We've just wrapped up an extensive 'road trip' research project for MTV, travelling the length and breadth of the UK to capture 'in the moment' attitudes to technology and digital innovation among a diverse range of young people.

One of our project outputs is a very swish looking booklet, produced in-house at Crowd DNA, and designed to editorialise the findings, ensuring they are engaging and attention grabbing for MTV's friends and clients in agency/brand world.

Drop us a line if you'd like a copy.

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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!

EffectivenessGamingMethodologyStrategyYouthUK Tribes

Nostalgia is nothing new. For time immemorial, we’ve chosen to distract ourselves and look for comfort in sights, sounds and ideas from the past. This is as familiar to people as it is to brands – some call it revivalism, some ‘retro’, often treading a fine line with heritage and tradition. But at Crowd DNA we’ve noticed a particular trend for nostalgia among young people and, given their tender age, this is mostly focused on the recent past of the 90s.

In underground youth culture there are good examples of how nostalgia resonates through movements and fashions. The London dance music scene is recycling sounds and ideas popular in the 90s – jungle and garage have rebranded themselves under the ‘future’ umbrella with very few changes to the sound itself. Voicemail ‘hotlines’ giving directions to warehouse parties, though never fading out entirely, have also shown a resurgence. There has been a slow but steady rise in ‘anti-Facebook’ promotion and flyers have become more popular again even though cheaper/free alternatives are available – people are after the personal touch.

Nostalgia is influencing purchasing too. According to Billboard, vinyl album sales are up 55 per cent in the first half of 2011 compared with the same period in 2010. Yahoo reported a 210 per cent year-on-year increase in searches of the phrase ‘blank cassette tapes’ and a 110 per cent rise in users seeking ‘music cassette tapes’.

Young people are the creators at the forefront of this nostalgia revolution. They are taking on the role of the tastemakers and innovators by making their own productions - collaborating with promoters, digital label owners/publishers and pushing their product in the form of their very own micro-brand.It has enabled them to promote their own version of nostalgia without the need for major brands/labels.

So what are the driving forces of today’s nostalgia and why is it so popular among UK youth? We’re living in uncertain times – the recession, the riots, unemployment – in many respects young people feel these more keenly than most. In our latest phase of research for Channel 4’s UK Tribes, we found that young people are feeling real fear that they won’t be able to find a job, let alone develop a fulfilling career. Nostalgia provides a welcome distraction.

But it’s not just today’s challenging times. Young people are actively creating nostalgia because little is really tangibly owned – films, music, photos etc are now digital. This makes them especially keen ‘memory makers’ who love to document everything.

Looking to the past also provides a steadying anchor. In our hyper-accelerated culture there’s a sense that trends are shifting too quickly, with music for example, obscure genres pop up on an almost a daily basis. In a recent study with influencers, we learnt that trends too often get confused with fads and that brands are too quick to jump on this ‘fad bandwagon’, sacrificing integrity for a quick buck – which is detrimental to a brand’s image in the long term. Looking to the past removes the uncertainty and unsettled feeling that myriad passing fads create.

So how do brands fit in? Clothing brands like Fred Perry have built a brand out of heritage and retro flavour and Nike is renowned for re-releasing classic trainers to its fan-boy collector market. The film industry often plays on this concept to profiteer from a successful brand – either ‘re-mastering’ classics or releasing CGI laden pre-/sequels (a few spring to mind). The gaming industry thrives off it too, with re-releases of popular retro games on an almost daily basis to accommodate the new mobile platforms.

However, times are changing and the brands are not in control as they once were - an individual working in his bedroom has taken on the role of the innovator, undermining some of the power that brands and labels have over trends. These innovators are successful as they recognise nostalgia thrives because it is selective – we don our rose-tinted spectacles and pick and choose the elements from the past that make us happy and comfort us. Not everything was good back in the day, but we curate the best bits and mix them up with today’s. Savvier brands will recognise and assist with this curation.

Related articles and further reading

How brands use nostalgia to comfort us

Nostalgia and 70s-90s dance music reissues

Ori Schwarz, ‘Good Young Nostalgia. Camera phones and technologies of self among Israeli youths’

Simon Reynolds ‘Retromania’ – examining the retro industry

BehaviourStrategyYouthMusicGaming

Last week social media was the primary tool for rioters, police, public and traditional media. It was credited with driving rioter and ‘civilian’ action, media coverage, government responses and ensuing brand involvement. But now that the dust is settling, how have social media and brands faired in the riot aftermath?

With 37% of all British youth on the private, untraceable, encrypted BlackBerry BBM network (Ofcom 2011), a handful of widely reported messages quickly attributed the brand as the rioters’ weapon of choice. With 60% of young people in the UK ‘highly addicted’ to their Smartphone (Ofcom 2011), BBM’s free instant messaging is one of the most popular tools to stay in touch and features hugely in Crowd DNA’s research with young people – not just among rioters. However the ‘corruption’ of BBM has caused a major shift in the public’s brand perception, with negative Twitter mentions rocketing from 16% to 24% over the riots (BrandWatch).

As Tottenham MP David Lammy pressured for the shut down of the entire BBM network at the height of the riots, hackers simultaneously threatened to release employee details from Research In Motion – the maker of BlackBerry devices – if they did so. The reach and influence of social media has been made painfully clear by BlackBerry’s adulteration by rioters. David Cameron has called for extended police powers when social media is used to incite violence, disorder and criminality and Theresa May will meet with Facebook, Twitter and Research In Motion in the coming weeks to discuss social media safety (The Guardian).

As BBM became synonymous with rioters, Twitter took on the mantle of ‘voice of the people’ by facilitating immediate public, police and media responses. Real time, first hand reporting from ‘civilians’ democratised riot knowledge, preceding traditional media coverage and facilitating mass public response to key issues.

Civilian-lead campaigns such as #Riotcleanup and #Riotwombles saw the online become offline as hundreds gathered to sweep the streets, and within hours civilian researchers were mapping the riots using online tools – laying the riot sites over the social deprivation index and against real-time twitter feeds to create up-to-the-minute mapping. Civilian policing became public as Twitter shared news of the Turkish communities defending the streets of Dalston, civilian journalists shared video content on Youtube and thousands who tweeted, posted, blogged and commented online.

The HM Government e-petition ‘Convicted London rioters should lose all benefits’ has seen the biggest public engagement in policymaking to date, with social-media-enabled link sharing leading to over 200,000 signatures – nearly 500% more than any other e-petition to date and twice the number needed to be considered in the House of Commons.

Police were quick to use civilian ‘detectives’ to identify rioters; with the Met’s Flickr site ‘Giving Photos From Operation Withern’, ‘Catch-A-Looter’ and ‘Zavilla: Identify UK Rioters’ all using social media to enable public identification. Social media is not a new resource for policing - the Greater Manchester Police were nominated for three ‘Golden Twits’ back in 2010, for tweeting every 999 call they received in real time in 24 hours, posting 3200 tweets across 3 twitter accounts. Social media helped to align police and public interests, give police a human voice and promote transparency – a significant issue in a society still reeling from expenses and phone hacking scandals and shocked by the lack of police presence in some affected areas.

Traditional media also relied on social media for up-to-the-minute information, with the BBC website merging traditional and social media coverage by offering live TV news alongside a live feed from tweeting journalists, official statements, press updates and public commentary; and broadsheets and magazines turned to Twitter to appeal to civilians to post from ‘in the action’. However traditional media sources have not been usurped by the civilian voice – they were very active on social media themselves, with journalists offering trustworthy tweets that cut through the wealth of rumour from unfounded sources.

Aside from BlackBerry, sportswear brands and retailers such as Adidas, Nike and Footlocker were also pervasive across all riot imagery – emblazoned on the trakkies or hoodies of the rioters themselves as they searched for the coveted loot of Nike Air Max and Sony TVs. The rioters’ focus on luxury sportswear and expensive technology drove right wing distain, claiming that rioters were ‘greedy not needy’ and that brands endorsed ‘boorish behaviour’ (Daily Mail) through celebrity endorsements such as Snoop Dogg for Adidas. Despite Levi’s pulling their ‘Legacy’ advert that features rioting, they have still received significant criticism for endorsing violence and being in bad taste despite never being aired in the UK.

Some brands took the opportunity to gain positive press and public acclaim by offering support to high profile riot victims. Ashraf Haziq (the exchange student mugged on camera during the riots) was given a replacement PSP from Sony along with games from Namco Bandai. Brands also engaged in civilian campaigns to public acclaim, with London ad agency BBH raising over £35,000 in less than 5 days for 89-year-old Tottenham barber Aaron Biber, EasyJet flying home over 60 MPs and Sainsbury’s handing out water to #Riotcleanup helpers. However Old El Paso must be the most unlikely brand to jump on the riot bandwagon, with their Facebook update –

“In these trying times I think we could all benefit from a bit of comfort food, and there are few things more tasty and reassuring than baked enchiladas, full of spicy chicken and topped with lots of bubbling cheese”

So what have we learnt from the riots? First and above all – social media makes the public powerful. It helped facilitate the riots and stop them, it democratised news reporting and comment and it gave the public the opportunity to work in partnership with and beyond the bounds of government, policing and traditional media. Social media united and mobilised public voice, gave it a political mandate but yet the most trusted sources were still traditional media operating in the social media space. Clearly there is still a clear challenge in how you cut through the din in the social media space; it’s a noisy environment, but, as those seeking credible information during the riots learnt, not all of the noise is reliable or trustworthy

For now, social and traditional media are complementary mediums that enrich and integrate the social experience and information sharing.

And as for brands faring badly from riot affiliations or cashing in on riot hype… as Ice T said, ‘don’t hate the player, hate the game’.

Social Mediaword of mouthYouthCommunityBehaviour

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.

BehaviourYouthStrategyUK Tribes

Wii U! PlayStation Vita! Skyrim! This year's E3 certainly delivered a few gems for serious gamers to get excited about.

But have any of these announcements cut through to your average gamer on the street? Now the dust has settled on E3, the gaming expo of all gaming expos, we thought it seemed an appropriate time to head-out to get a better understanding of the current gaming landscape and to see what, if any, of the recent announcements are already cutting through...

So what did we learn? Is the over saturation of first person shooters beginning to take its toll? 

Without wanting to sit on the fence... Yes and no. The FPS genre is still one of the preferred among the majority of gamers; it’s highly suited for online play and it ticks a few essential boxes that we’ve unearthed when researching the emotional benefits gamers crave – namely competitiveness, escapism and immersion through graphical depth.

It’s unrealistic to predict a general ‘shunning’ of such a well loved genre, but, interestingly, the current poster boy for the genre, Call Of Duty, could possibly be the victim in this attitudinal shift; with many accusing the franchise of being too repetitious.

It leaves some interesting potential for a rival game to grab a bit of that lucrative market share Call Of Duty has been hogging. Will certainly be an interesting year for EA and Battlefield...

Nintendo products still seen as ‘childish’

This might be something Nintendo see as a triumph, it’s tricky to say! But the general consensus was Xbox and PlayStation = hardcore/serious gaming consoles and Nintendo = fun/kiddie. On the surface and from a commercial point-of-view, this would seem something of a disaster, with Ninty missing out on a significant important share of the gaming audience. However on the flipside, their cross-generational strategy is clearly working and was visible in the eyes of the participants we spoke to – and if they’re hitting a broader range of consumers than their competitors (old ladies to new born babies, apparently) then perhaps this provides a better stream of revenue than the traditional gaming model.

Wii U gaining more traction than PlayStation Vita

Obviously we’re dealing with a small sample size, but the Wii U has seemingly cut through more than Sony’s own new piece of kit. That said, the Wii U wasn’t the clearest offering in the world for them, with many of its wizzy functions going un-noticed.

3D is the future...unfortunately

There was a strange acceptance that 3D will be the future of the gaming industry – strange in that most didn’t seem happy about that prospect. The reluctance seemed to be an extension of their general lack of enthusiasm towards 3D TV, and, rightly or wrongly, they’re lumping these two things together. For them, the most practical future facing technology was touch screen devices and motion control – though a greater level of refinement needs to be applied for both models.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the video and get in-touch if you have any games related research queries!

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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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