While Millennials aren’t a monolithic group, many Millennials have certain traits in common:
❯❯ They use various media to communicate. Millennials don’t confine themselves to one particular medium. The average Millennial is active on multiple social accounts, messaging platforms, and devices. You don’t necessarily need to plan to be active or even discoverable on every one of these media. That would be too costly. But you should get to know your audience and familiarize yourself with their preferred means of communicating. Then you can identify those media that stand to generate the greatest return for your brand.
❯❯ Mobile is the primary communications tool. Whatever Millennials do, they prefer to do it on mobile. The explosive growth of mobile is unprecedented. Marketers have had to make a dramatic shift in the way they do business. Millennials are on the go and wherever they go, their mobile devices go with them. Essentially, ignoring mobile means ignoring your audience, and that is a recipe for disaster. (Marketing to Millennials on mobile is covered in Chapter 8.)
❯❯ Personalities differ from one platform to another. The average Millennial may be active on four or five kinds of digital media. If they’re active on several media, it doesn’t mean that your brand will necessarily find success marketing to them in the same way on each platform. Millennials use different media in unique ways. To communicate effectively, analyze your audience on each platform.
Sharing means a lot more than it used to, thanks in large part to new media like Facebook, Twitter, and Airbnb. You can look at the concept of sharing from two perspectives.
First is the content and information approach. Millennials share more with each other and with brands than any generation that came before them. Unlike Baby Boomers, Millennials have indicated that they are willing to share personal information with brands. This willingness to share has led to the explosion of data-gathering methods, such as social sign-in. Social sign-in allows users to sign in with a single click via Google or Facebook.
Thanks to social sign-in, your brand can collect a significant amount of data without having to directly questioning your audience. The desire for simplicity and convenience on the part of the Millennial consumers means that they’re likely to use this option. It’s less cumbersome than creating stand-alone profiles for each platform and limiting the information they share with brands. Data is crucial to the creation and improvement of your Millennial marketing strategy. The willingness of Millennials to share via social sign-in means that those processes are made significantly easier.
The second concept of sharing relates to the rise of the sharing economy (covered in detail in Chapter 12). Millennial consumers agree that access to goods and services is more important than ownership. Brands like Airbnb (https://airbnb.com) and Uber (https://uber.com) recognized this fact and built multibillion-dollar businesses to capitalize on it. The priorities and measurements of success have changed for Millennials. The sharing economy has facilitated this transformation. (Chapter 12 covers the sharing economy.)
Impulsivity and ownership are no longer the names of the game when it comes to making purchasing decisions. Millennials have access to a wealth of information that can help them make informed, educated, and trusted decisions, and they don’t hurry the process.
The Edelman Trust Barometer showed that industry and academic experts and peers rank above brands as trusted advisors. Review sites like Yelp!, shown in Figure 1-1, make peer reviews readily available for virtually any type of product or service. Millennials use these kinds of sites when making a buying decision.
FIGURE 1-1: Yelp! allows consumers to provide reviews.
As the availability of trustworthy, verifiable information, such as reviews, has increased, their impact has been noticeable across all markets. A 2015 study by Forbes found that only about 1 percent of Millennial consumers would trust a brand more as a result of traditional advertising. Roughly, a third of Millennials review blogs and review sites before making a purchase. Authenticity is what matters most to these prospects, and that outweighs even the quality of content.
This trend has leveled the playing field for smaller brands. Of course, big budgets open doors and opportunities not available to smaller companies, but now they have the opportunity to compete for the same business as larger organizations.
Chapter 2
Creating a Modern View of Millennials
❯❯ Defining the Millennial consumer
❯❯ Recognizing common errors marketers make with Millennials
❯❯ Understanding the Millennial mindset and its implications
Building an effective strategy for Millennial consumers begins with a clear understanding of their unique characteristics. Some marketers miss the basics. Millennials, like any generation, are defined as a group of consumers that fall into a certain age bracket. But, in some cases marketing to Millennials requires you to look beyond age. For this reason, you need to develop a deep understanding of this market so that you don’t misunderstand its complex nature.
In this chapter, you start thinking about Millennials as prototypes for the next generation of consumers. They’re not simply soon-to-be-wealthy 20-somethings that are difficult to reach. They represent a seismic shift in the world of marketing.
Understanding the Marketer’s Perception of Millennials
If you ask the average marketer to define the term Millennial, he or she would almost certainly start by stating that Millennials are consumers born between the years 1980 and 2000. While, demographically this is a fact, the reality is that the term Millennial embodies so much more. That said, marketers still hold certain prevailing notions when it comes to defining this important group.
The date ranges vary from one demographer to the next, but for the sake of simplicity, the generally accepted starting point for the Millennial generation is 1980. While the latter point of the date range varies considerably, it’s safe to say that an accepted cutoff point would be 2000. Some demographers are interested in only designating those who reach the end of high school age by 2000 as Millennials. Others define the generation as reaching consumer maturity in the mid-2010s. Whichever range you choose to use, Millennials are the largest, most influential group of consumers in the world (see Chapter 1).
To gain some insight about Millennials, the Pew Research Center asked Millennials to describe themselves, as shown in Figure 2-1. As you can see in Figure 2-1, Millennials have a very particular perception of themselves that sometimes conflicts with other people’s perceptions. Forty-nine percent of respondents indicate that they feel Millennials are wasteful, while 40 percent believe that Millennials are environmentally conscious. You may also find it a little hard to imagine someone being both cynical and idealistic, yet 39 percent of the Millennials who answered this survey felt that the general demographic is idealistic, while 31 percent believe that the generation is cynical. Clearly, you need to understand your particular niche audience so that you target the right characteristics.
