As the middle class expanded, kids began spending longer and longer periods of time in classrooms, grouped by age, outside of the influence of adults. With growing middle-class family budgets, and a burgeoning industrial economy, kids suddenly had consumer power and an identity unto themselves. As a consequence, a youth culture began to emerge, and with it a specific language and a shared appreciation for the music, literature, movies, fashion, places, ideals, and activities that spoke directly to youth, because it came directly from youth.
Suddenly, youth culture had a voice and sought out channels of communication to express that voice. Through college radio stations, self-published magazines and newsletters, grassroots movements, or homebrew computer clubs, America's youth found a way to communicate with one another, and began to establish their footprint on the culture of the adult world. But even as recently as the sixties and seventies, our nation's youth remained a fringe culture with crude tools and few resources. It was, at most, a reaction against mainstream culture that lived on the outside looking in.
Today, far from a fringe or counterculture, our nation's youth have become the driving force behind American innovation, growth, and competitive advantage globally. As a result of our technological revolution, we are now living in a YouthNation, and all the old bets are off. The power and influence of YouthNation stands to dramatically shift every business, consumer, politician, nation, city, town, and village around the world.
This epic shift is disrupting just about everything that we took for granted about the old economy:
• The importance of a college education
• The vision of the American dream
• What success actually means
• What and how we buy
• What and how we sell
• What brands must do to embrace this new national and global ethos and compete
YouthNation has broken free from the hold that big media and big advertising have had on culture, and completely transformed the approach that brands must take in order to appeal to today's target market. The ripple effect from this monumental sea of change has and will continue to completely transform the way we work, play, and live, and is demanding and encouraging us all to be, in many ways, forever young if we want to compete.
So let's be clear. For brands today, the old marketing models are over. The status quo is dead. Today's rapidly shifting marketplace requires businesses to be agile, connected, authentic, artful, meaningful, immersive, and socially responsible. In other words, today, businesses have to embody the ideals of YouthNation, regardless of age or size, in order to succeed.
In YouthNation's hyper-socialized, Instagram fanatical, experience-obsessed marketplace, youth is no longer an age, or even a demographic, but the primary catalyst of business and culture. Fortunately, thanks to technology and the progressive ideals that social media has engendered, youth has become a commodity that is available to everyone; all we have to do is figure out how to tap these new and rapidly evolving resources in our businesses, as well as in our lives.
So how do you harness the enormous power of today's youth-driven economy, where everything is changing at the pace of a teenager's attention span, and future-fit your business for long-term success?
This is the book that will give you all the tools and understanding that you will need to understand the nuances of YouthNation and harness the enormous power of the perpetual youth economy.
As the founder and CEO of MRY (formerly known as Mr Youth), an NYC-based creative and technology agency which has specialized for well over a decade in marketing to youth for such brand titans as Visa, Johnson & Johnson, and Microsoft, I've learned a lot about how YouthNation thinks, works, plays, and spends. Since I was a freshman at Boston University two decades ago handing out nightclub flyers on the corner of Kenmore Square, I've made a career out of effectively engaging YouthNation on behalf of brands, and leveraging technology in order to keep pace with the counterculture that has now become the mainstream culture itself.
From Big Data 101, which explains how to use New-Gen psychographics to market effectively in a post demographic world, to how to tell a brand story worth sharing that builds engagement and evangelism to tips for cocreating immersive and engaging experiences that build viral followings and loyal brand communities, YouthNation will offer businesses large and small an indispensible map to navigate the radically changed landscape of the present and the future marketplace.
So let's get started, and right away, because in YouthNation, everything happens in real time, and in the blink of a Snapchat.
Chapter 1
From Status Symbol to Status Update
The notion of the status symbol goes back as far as human history. In ancient China, once a man reached 20, he was permitted to wear a cap. This was celebrated with a ceremony called Guanli, or Ceremony of the Cap. As each new dynasty took hold, the caste system of the cap evolved, developing ever more specific rules and privileges associated with each style. What your cap looked like, and what shape or color it was, said very important things about you. For example, in the Han Dynasty a “lowly person” had to be content wearing only a headband, whereas the elite could get really decadent and wear a headband with a matching hat.
Since its early beginnings with the highly nuanced Chinese cap trend, the notion of the status symbol really took off, taking hold all over the globe in an ever widening array of objects and styles, all designed to tell a story about the importance of the owner. In America today, Maybach vehicles, Christian Louboutin shoes, Hublot watches, and real estate in glamorous places like the Hamptons or Malibu are the de rigeur status symbols of opulence and power among the super wealthy.
America's youth has had a love/hate relationship with status symbols. For one, the glittering objects of the affluent elite have been by and large out of reach for them. In earlier generations, young people were motivated to work hard and long to reach the point where status symbols such as a beautiful home or a nice car were attainable. As the gap between aspirational youth and the affluent mainstream widened, however, the nation's youth rejected the status quo and turned to anti–status symbols to express a different kind of importance within their own cultural sphere.
Along with this shift away from traditional status symbols, came a new set of values to support this new anti-status iconography. In the sixties, for example, ripped jeans, flag t-shirts, and long hair became counterculture status symbols. Along with these symbols came a lifestyle and world vision centered on experiences that were not about luxury but about the pure enjoyment of life in its simplest and purest form. Be-ins, happenings, and protests, became the status alternatives for a youth culture in revolt against a system that had shut them out entirely, and that stood for materialism over existentialism. For young America in those days, poverty became chic, and wealth became tacky. And so a schism grew up between the mainstream and the counterculture with regard to visions of what status really meant, what was truly important and valuable in life, and how that was expressed.
The Hip-Hop Invasion and the Reimagined Status Symbol
Young America's feelings about mainstream status symbols changed dramatically in the nineties. Suddenly, traditional status symbols of luxury and affluence became more accessible to youth culture. The accessibility of luxury opened up enormous windows of opportunities for brands and entertainers alike. The emergence of hip-hop culture combined with a booming economy toward the end of the twentieth century brought status symbols to young people in a whole new way. An infinite and innovative variety of status symbols, which were accessible and available everywhere from suburban malls to urban street corners across the U.S., led a hip-hop renaissance, along with a world vision that supported this new emphasis on accessible affluence for youth.
Hip-Hop Status Symbol Highlights
Through pervasive lyrics, from the likes of Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, Kanye West, Mase, Nas, and others, the new importance of status symbols to young America came through loud and clear. This new youth narrative, which stressed affordable opulence,