Subject: PRSA Public Relations Tactics Placement
From: "Merilee Kern" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>, <[email-masked]>, "Raoul Davis" <[email-masked]>, "Tina Wells" <[email-masked]>, <[email-masked]>, <[email-masked]>, <[email-masked]>, "Merilee Kern" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2011 10:45:01 -0700

http://www.prsa.org/Intelligence/Tactics/Articles/view/9319/1034/Connecting_with_today_s_young_consumer

Connecting with today's young consumer
By Jason Woodward

August 1, 2011

At 16 years old, Tina Wells began writing for The New Girl Times, a magazine targeted toward teenage girls.  The editors would send her products to test, and she would write a short review in return.

Wells, founder and CEO of Buzz Marketing Group, turned this one-woman market research gig into a thriving international business. She has since been named to Essence's 40 Under 40, Billboard's 30 Under 30 and Inc's 30 Under 30 lists.

In her new book, "Chasing Youth Culture and Getting It Right,"  Wells talks about how to best target the multidimensional and highly lucrative millennial market. She recently shared some of her thoughts with Tactics.

Segment customers based on mindset and lifestyle. "Things we used to attribute to people based on age are not the same anymore,"  she says.

Wells found that age segmentation - targeting a product toward "teens" ages 13-19, for example - sets demographic boundaries that ignore the reality of millennials' behavior.

"Cultural shifts and technological shifts are giving way to a much more important mindset element."

Incorporate new media from the ground up. "A lot of [companies] still approach technology as an add-on and not as the nucleus of their campaign," she said.  "They say,  'We're going to run an ad in print,' or  'We're going to do a social media campaign.' But really, the heart of what you do has to live online. It has to connect socially with millennials."

Collaborate with customers. "Brands no longer fully control the user experiences with the brand. It's no longer a one-way communication, and that makes it more difficult to manage brand equity."  
Wells suggests engaging consumers directly and working with them to shape the brand's conversation and image.

Experiment with intangibles. "Science has not caught up with the consumer," Wells says, referring to the difficulty of measuring customer behavior. TV Nielsen ratings, for example, cannot accurately monitor views from Netflix, Hulu or DVRs.

"We are so used to traditional measurements that don't really exist anymore in this new social climate."
Wells says that marketers must try things out and see what works for them. "That's the hard part," she says.