Branding and the Reality Generation

The student volunteers were equipped with camera equipment to record their own views and were also encouraged to quiz local people in the cities they visited.

Chris Nurko, managing director of branding at FutureBrand UK, the consultancy who undertook the research, says "The aim was to get beneath the surface of many attitudes either misunderstood by traditional researchers or taken for granted. The longer you spend with people the more relaxed and open they become. This approach gets far more honest results than conventional focus group research."

Several key findings arose concerning the group of young people's main interests and concerns, such as a preference for real information over artificial or aspirational advertising. Instead of buying into brand dreams like 'Nikeworld is a world of winners', they are more likely to say, "So it is a good shoe. What are you doing about child labour in the third world?"

Another finding was that they rate an advertisement's entertainment value and relevance highly and tend to dismiss concepts like 'brand values' and 'positioning'. They reveal a deep dislike of homogeneity and have a predilection for the quirky and diverse. They have an aversion of being labelled, of uniformity and of easy answers.

A clear conclusion of the road trip was that today's young are full of inconsistencies. While disagreeing with MacDonalds they'll still eat there, and while highly rating other brands, like Benneton, they don't necessarily buy the products.