Three essential tips you don't get from a marketing degree

In these tough times, nothing less than drastic change is called for. Jane Lyne-Kritzinger, MD of Youth Dynamix (YDx), a youth marketing and research agency, offers three tips to help you get to grips with winning the youth over in current market conditions…

How to flip what you learnt in your marketing course to get real results:

Jane shows us how to adapt what we learnt in marketing to become more relevant to the contemporary generation of youth consumers…

1. Flip your brand from product-centric to consumer-centric: The 4 Ps (Product, Place, Promotion and Price) are a given in this day-and-age. If your product is not functional (ie. It doesn’t do what it’s supposed to), it’s dead in the water and no amount of marketing will resuscitate it. It’s not about creating a product to sell to a target market anymore but intricately understanding your consumer in order to create a product that fits perfectly into their world.

2. Flip your marketing spend from traditional advertising to meaningful engagement: If you’re still blowing millions on mass advertising, your brand could soon be obsolete. The youth yearn for meaningful engagement and survival belongs to those brands that are able to add value to the consumer by uplifting communities. Channel your budget to marketing activities that harness an emotional connection, like providing relevant and useful content, and engaging the consumer through value-add experiential campaigns.

3. Flip your communications strategy to a two-way channel: The youth want to feel like they’re a part of the brands they connect with. It’s no longer about presenting a picture-perfect one-directional message to the consumer but enabling the consumer to form part of your marketing messages. The cellphone has become a natural extension of the youth’s anatomy, and through this device, they become personally involved in crafting phenomenal marketing campaigns from a ‘real’ point-of-view.

Youth marketing is undergoing colossal changes right before our eyes and astute brand managers are perceiving these changes and adapting their approaches while dozens of static brands fall off the radar every year.