The kids are alright

One question is coming up in meetings more frequently than before: how do we reach younger consumers?

As the consumer baton passes to a younger, online and tech-savvy group, many brands are struggling to connect. In several recent projects, the brief explicitly asked us to find out what young people want, read, eat, consume, understand and care about.

There are plenty of prejudices lurking behind that question. Because young people do not behave like their parents, they are assumed to be frivolous, uninformed, disloyal and ungrateful.

“Kids today”—a broad and admittedly suspicious description of anyone aged 15 to 28—are often very well informed. They simply do not receive their news directly from mainstream or conventional sources. Information arrives through many channels, corroborating and contradicting itself as it goes.

They know what is going on. They may just not agree with your root-cause analysis.

They also know about food and what is in it. They pay closer attention to what they consume and are more likely to abstain from alcohol than previous generations were at the same age. Bad news for alcohol producers. Possibly good news for human health.

Calling them “digital natives”, however, is stretching it. Being good at using a phone to access information and create content does not necessarily make someone good at using a computer. Our work with the education system showed clearly that high-school students are not automatically proficient computer users.

The school system has also largely neglected ten-finger typing, so writing efficiently on a computer is hardly universal. Check your colleagues in the office for confirmation.

Changing consumer behaviour

The bigger issue in the Baltic states is that many brands have focused on essentially the same target group since the early 1990s. They have grown older with their original customers and neglected to build meaningful connections with the younger consumers whose purchasing power is now being felt.

Some of this was logical. Companies themselves changed enormously after the early nineties. But the result is vulnerability: a new generation has arrived without inheriting its parents’ brand loyalties.

For consumers who did not grow up discovering brands, but grew up surrounded by all of them, the distinction between local and international is much weaker. Global competition—on shelves, online and everywhere in between—means every product and service has to establish its own value. Nostalgia and patriotism aren’t enough to help, and they cannot carry the shopping bag.

Irrelevance is like bankruptcy. It happens very slowly, and then very quickly.

Some changes are trends and fads that will fade. Others are undoubtedly here to stay. Understanding which is which—and what they mean for your business—is not nice to know. It is crucial knowledge, because obsolescence can arrive with surprising speed.

When was the last time you saw them watch TV?