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Pew Report on Millennials. A Prediction.

February 25, 2010 in Marketing | 0 Comments

I love testing this raggedy brain when it comes to prognostication, so I’m going to stick my neck out before I read the Pew Research study on Millennials and venture a predition. 

People are a little like products.  In the lifecycle of a product there are stages just as there are stages in life. In the first stage, infancy, the form is sponge-like, taking in everything and developing on all fronts.  In adolescence, there is growth and testing — sticking fingers in electrical sockets – an amazing amount of learning and change. By the time people and products are Millennials they are still open to change but have become invested in their personalities. They’ve been around, yet they don’t always have the resources to do what they want.  Let’s leave middle age and the autumn or harvest years for a later discussion.

The Pew Research Center Report on Millennials (the people, not the products) entitled “Confident. Connected. Open to Change.” looks at the demographic: late teens and 20 years old.  It’s suitably named, albeit perhaps not completely seen through the steadied lens of our financially challenged times. (My take is that Millennials will be a little less confident, a little less open to change than the report states, but still quite connected.)

Marketing Planner’s Dream

Here’s the prediction: This group is a marketing planner’s dream. Especially so, because they’re amazingly attuned to usability.  Millennials are open to new ways, yet judgmental. Product and marketing planners should be studying Millennials for everything: healthcare, energy, clean tech, diet. Everything.  There will be some gems in this research report and many ideas to have ideas.

 Tomorrow, my take on the report. Peace!

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The Future of Market Research is Open.

July 10, 2008 in Marketing | 0 Comments


 

WPP is putting up some big pounds in pursuit of global marketing research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS). Martin Sorrell’s group is in a bidding war with GfK. Though Taylor Nelson seems to be going strong today with a high stock price, I am of the mind that technology and the Internet will start to crimp the style of these global market research companies. I know, I know, it’s not just about data collection and distribution. You have to do something smart with it. Value-add, as T.N.S. likes to say. Though, with all that I hear, read and see today, marketers are becoming more facile with data collection tools and I’m thinking that a good deal of market research will be handled in-house 3-5 years from now. 
 
Some smart marketing nerds are going to provide an open source tool that will let users tap into a variety of sales measurement, analytic and prediction schema. Mr. Sorrell, buy the company, if you must, but mine it for the best data and software people and get out in front of this. Peace!
 

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The Original Nielsen Machine.

May 15, 2007 in Marketing | 0 Comments

The original Nielsen rating machine was a man. Many men, in fact. They sat at home after work and on weekends with their wives and families and watched consumer consumption behavior. They discussed and probed likes and dislikes in media, products and messages. They went to the office and shared these observations in meetings, whereupon groups of professionals came up with hypotheses about behavior, preference and selling schema. These men worked at ad agencies — and when women joined the workforce in great numbers, the machine really took off.
 
These men and women came from many cities across the country, and periodically met at national functions so they could exchange regional views about consumer behavior and media consumption.
 
Over the past few decades we’ve ceded the old machine to the Nielsen audience meter and other such devices. Today we have set-top boxes and supermarket scanners to tell us if people are watching TV shows and buying our products. But the technology still has a hard time tracking when people are watching commercials, or why they are buying Crest instead of Aquafresh, so we employ anthropologists to do fieldwork. Think of them as ad nannies who tag along as part of the family.
 
If nannies are surrogate parents, then anthropologists are surrogate ad professionals as they were back in “the day.” The day when we were smart enough to keep our eyes and ears open and observe the behavior of consumer consumption. 

Eyes and ears still make the best ads and build the best brands.

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