Family Identity Online
October 2011. Traditionally marketers place enormous emphasis on youth marketing. Conventional wisdom notes that youth are early adopters, trend setters, and still in a stage of preference formation rather than entrenched brand loyalty. A quick look at some centers of digital life (Apple products, Twitter, FaceBook, Living Social) seems to confirm the youth focus in both marketing and products/services offered. With the occaisional nod to boomers and other "older" generations, these companies seem hyper-fosued on appealing to a demographic that is young, single, and urban: the new digitally hip. Yet there is a quiet tension underneath this current. Today's youth, particularly in times of recession, lack the purchasing power of older generations. They also now share their online world with the first generation of parents who have raised kids in an entirely Internet-defined era. There's a double tension here: youth vs. age, but also individual vs. family. I'll comment on the former, but its that latter I on which I really want to focus.
Here's a typical "youth marketing" line of thought: consumer marketing has to reach the consumer at an early age. Someone in their 40s or 50s probably hasn't changed their brand of toothpaste or peanut butter in decades; their brand loyalties are fixed. By contrast, a 12 year old has very little established brand loyalty, and whoever wins that loyalty will have a customer for life. So while the 40 year old has greater current purchasing power, the 12 year old has greater uncommitted purchasing decsions, and is thus more worthy of marketing attention, and -- crucially -- gets higher priority in the feature definition process for new products and services.
All of this seems relentlessly sensible, if a bit mercenary, until you realize that this view is based on a huge mistaken assumption: that the products and services available to the 12 year today will closely resemble those available to the 40 year old 28 years from now.
Think of entire brands that were prominent 15-20 years ago that are (a) gone today, and (b) casualties of our digital revolution. Cellular One? Compuserve? Borders? Netscape? All of the youth marketing dollars spent on those brands gains them nothing today. Similarly, think of entire product and service categories that are vital to consumer purchasing decisions today that hardly mattered even five years ago: smart phones, tablets, streaming video services, social networks. Any youth marketing dollars spent by Nokia or RIM became meaningless the day the iPhone launched. We fret over the future direction of Netflix, but no one even mentions TiVo any more.
The next five years promise equal, if not greater change in our digital world, and consequent disruption in the best laid consumer marketing plans. Marketing must focus on the purchasing decisions of today, not the elusive and unpredictable brands of tomorrow.
I am a product manager, not a product marketer, by profession. So I am less interested in how brands are positioned, and more interested in how features are defined and prioritized. I am also a husband and a father. And what worries me more than the over-emphasis on youth marketing is the way in which the family has been pushed aside by the individual as a customer. We families are collateral damage in the war for the digital attention of consumers.
Example One: Our Netflix streaming queue is a mess. It is dominated by the preferences of our 5 year old, who is also the heaviest user of Netflix streaming in our household. Somewhere amidst the "Thomas the Tank Engine" and "Pingu" videos, and the endless sequels to "Free Willy" are sprinkled the items that my wife and I actually watch. And Netflix offers no easy way to sort this out because even though we consume Netflix as a household, we subscribe to it as an individual.
Example Two: Amazon has no idea what to recommend that I read. While my email inbox is peppered with suggestions from Amazon, they overwhelmingly miss the mark. To Amazon I look schizophrenic. Somtimes I appear to have the military sci fi interests of a teenager (my oldest son), sometimes the romance and female protagonist thriller interests of a housewife (my wife), sometimes the board book interests of a two year old (hey Amazon, my youngest is five now, so move on!). Again, we consume Amazon products as a household, but purchase as an individual.
This shouldn't be difficult. Families often participate in the digital world as a unit. Treating them as an individual instead of a family is just dumb.
All right, enough for now. I've set the stage. This is the theme I'll be returning to in future posts.