The Most Diverse Generation in History

Marketing to Millenials is tricky. They are, as AJ Agrawal writes at Forbes, “the most diverse generation to have ever existed.”

Born between 1982 and 2002, the youngest are only 13 years old, but the oldest are already 34. Those on the tail end of the cohort are still basically children, but half are old enough to be college grads. Many have founded their own companies.

“You’ll find millennials consisting of everyone from single mothers to middle class professionals,” Agrawal writes. “You’ll find them in every single social class and industry from apps to fashion trends and marketing.”

That was true of previous generations too, of course, but it’s much more true of Millenials.

They’re even more unique in other ways. GenXers and Boomers remember the days before iTunes and Spotify when nearly everyone listened to the same music on the same handful of radio stations. They remember when everyone watched the same programs on television because nobody had more than a couple of channels.

They remember when everybody got their news from the same local newspaper and the same two or three local television networks. Back then, Americans of all ages and ethnic groups and political orientations shared the same cultural reference points. Tastes diverged, but not nearly as much as they do now.

The days of mass production, mass media, mass communication, and mass marketing are over forever. Never before has market segmentation and even individualization been more crucial, but some businesses are still stuck in the past.

“Many brands,” Patrick Spenner writes, “continue to push traditional life markers such as getting married, buying a home and starting a family, because that’s what drove older generations’ purchasing habits.”

Katie Elfering, a consumer strategist at CEB Iconoculture, digs deeper.

Millennials grew up in an expanding world of choice and options for just about everything they ever needed or wanted. Because of this, they view life very differently. They don’t see just see one path available to them—they see limitless possibilities to make their life their own. And as a result, they are misjudged and misunderstood—called narcissists or assumed to be in a state of perpetual stunted adulthood. In reality, it’s because a lot of these aspects of adulthood aren’t as available as they were in the past and, more importantly, because they know they have a lot of alternative options for what adulthood looks like… Brands need to stop waiting for Millennials to “grow up” and fall in line with what past generations have done.

Indeed. Millenials aren’t going to start behaving—or shopping—like Baby Boomers for the same reason America can’t go back to the 1950s—or even the early 2000s. History has no rewind button.

Boomers lived their young adult lives the way they did because they were the products of a stable post-war America with mass production, mass communication and mass everything else. We all live in a hyperindividualized world now, but Millenials have never known anything else. They’re going to be around longer than the rest of us, too. Advertisers and marketers, like all other professionals, had better get used to it.

Virtual Reality Will Transform Marketing

Virtual Reality is here. And it’s going to dramatically transform marketing as much as it will change entertainment.

The Oculus Rift headset was released this week, and the content reel on the company’s website makes it look like a blast. The content itself isn’t anything new, though. Mostly, it consists of video games, and video games have been around in one form or another since the 1970s.

We should expect the first generation of virtual reality applications and content to mimic the old forms, the way the first films resembled stage plays on screen, and the way early websites resembled print flyers.

What’s new here is the immersive experience. And with an immersive experience, we have an entirely new set of possibilities that we haven’t even begun to explore yet. Imagine, for instance, using a more advanced version of Google Earth with a virtual reality headset. Imagine, while you’re at it, using a more advanced version of Google Moon with a virtual reality headset.

Now imagine immersive marketing using a virtual reality headset. No, not immersive junk mail. Not immersive spam. And not 3-D banner ads. Imagine transporting your would-be customers to another place and time altogether.

SocialTimes recently interviewed Joshua Keller, CEO of Union Square Media, about the possibilities. “The most exciting aspect of VR,” he said, “is that the possibilities of it are limitless. Unlike traditional marketing forms like print, radio, and TV where you’re confined to a certain box of how you can spin campaigns, with VR marketers are much less restrained in the creativity of their campaigns. An auto-maker can offer virtual test drives or can walk users virtually through the manufacturing process. It is much more personal than a commercial spot where they’re seeing a model drive a car along the coast.”

You’d miss a couple of things on a virtual test drive. You wouldn’t really know how it feels. You wouldn’t know how well the seat fits your body, how much you can and can’t feel the road, or if the ride is quiet or loud on the freeway. But still. How much fun would that be?

And imagine if you’re looking for a new home. You could virtually tour a house before requesting a real-life showing by the real estate agent. You could “walk” up the steps, onto the porch, into the living room, down the hallway, through the kitchen, and out the back into the yard. You could place mockups of your own furniture into the house and see what it would look like.

Maybe you’re trying to decide where to stay on vacation. You could virtually tour resorts, hotels and vacation rentals. You could “stroll” the beaches on Maui or the back country trails in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

The possibilities really are endless.

Some forms of marketing—junk mail, spam, online ads that bog down websites—are annoying. But virtual reality marketing won’t be the least bit annoying when it’s done right. Customers will love it. At its best, it could be indistinguishable from entertainment.

Who wouldn’t want to virtually attend a live concert by their favorite new band while they’re on the road promoting their new album? Who wouldn’t want to virtually tour the Florida Keys if they’re in the market for a vacation to the Florida Keys? Who wouldn’t want to virtually test-drive the new Audi on a winding coast road even if they can’t feel the seat?

Sharpen Your Writing Chops in One Hour

Whether you’re copywriter, a content marketer, a novelist, or a journalist, there’s a little-known teaching tool available to everyone that can dramatically improve your writing in just an hour.

Find a writer who’s better than you and type their best work verbatim into your own word processor.

This is only plagiarism if you publish it, and you’re not going to publish it. (We certainly hope not, anyway.) This is just an exercise, a teaching tool, and it’s a powerful one.

Typing someone else’s words onto your own screen is the most intimate of all possible writing acts. It’s as if you’re opening up your mind and letting someone else take over for a while, almost as if you’re channeling them.

If you’re a novelist and spend an hour or so typing James Lee Burke’s lush descriptions, Raymond Carver’s spare prose, or Lee Child’s gripping action scenes, you’ll get a far better feel for how and why their words and sentences work so well than you ever could from just reading them.

Likewise, if you’re a copywriter who admires, say, the picture-window quality of the words on Adobe’s website, spend an hour or two typing that copy word-for-word onto your own screen. After a while, you’ll get so used to it that writing it yourself will seem easy.

It won’t be easy, but rest assured that it’s not easy for the writers you want to emulate either. They take great care in crafting and editing their copy to near perfection.

By typing the words, sentences, and paragraphs of great writers, your brain will process the way they use language at the deepest possible level. When their words flow from your eyes, through your brain, out your fingertips, and onto your own screen, you’ll be training yourself—subconsciously as well as consciously—to write more like them than you already do.

You’ll get a feel for word selection, pacing, sentence rhythm, information flow, and subtle touches that are hard to explain and even notice when you’re passively reading. It’s like having a great teacher sitting next to you and saying, “watch me and do exactly what I do.” If you spend enough time doing this, next time you get stuck you’ll be able to ask yourself what the great writers you’ve copied would do, and you’ll know the answer.

You can’t turn yourself into the next Hemingway even if you retype every word the man ever wrote, but if you re-type a lot of it, your own work will be far more Hemingway-esque than it used to be. Guaranteed.

Go ahead. Pick a writer who’s better than you are. Pick one of the masters and become that writer for an hour or two. You may be astonished at the results when you get back to work.

Lowering Prices Can Make You a Lot More Money

It’s a hard thing for some businesses to comprehend, but lower prices can bring in a lot more money. Just look at Walmart. Whether you love the company or hate it, there’s no denying that its “always low prices” strategy works. It’s the largest company by revenue in the world.

You have to be careful, though. The lower the price, the lower the perceived value. You wouldn’t buy a smartphone for 99 cents. The thing wouldn’t even work. It would have to be some kind of a scam. Perhaps it’s a dead phone that somebody dropped in the shower and is being sold used as a repurposed paperweight.

The higher the price, the higher the perceived value. What would you think of a smartphone that cost 5,000 dollars? That phone must really be something. The new iPhone probably looks like a 1980s Atari console by comparison. Leonardo DiCaprio probably has one. But we don’t have Leonardo DiCaprio’s budget, so we’re not dropping five grand on a phone, not even if the battery lasts all year on a single charge.

It may be hard to admit this, but you’re generally better off erring by pricing a little too low than a little too high. You’ll move a lot more units while doing little or no damage to the perceived value.

The Marketing MO blog precisely sums up how an elastic demand curve works.
When you raise prices slightly, volume goes down substantially.
When you lower prices slightly, volume goes up substantially.
Of course, you’ll want to make sure a lower price doesn’t obliterate your profit margin. You want to find the sweet spot that yields the most revenue. If you sell more units at a lower price but hardly make any money because the profit margin is miniscule, it’s not worth it. Likewise, if you’re only selling a small number of units because your price is too high, it doesn’t matter if you can drive a tank fleet through your profit margin—you’re not making much money.

Generally, you’ll have to price your products within the normal range of the market unless your product is stratospherically better than the competition’s, but even then you have to be careful. Your would-be customers will compare your prices to everyone else’s if it’s remotely feasible for them to do so. If they’re making a purchasing decision while standing in the aisle at Best Buy or browsing online at Amazon.com, price shopping is no more difficult than moving their eyeballs.

Sean D’Souza at Copyblogger makes a good point. “You want to create a situation where clients have stopped considering the competition and are now choosing from your range of products, services, or courses.”

You can do this easily if you sell directly from your own website. Potential customers will have to take at least a few extra steps before they can price shop. Instead of comparing your product’s prices to those of your competition, they’ll be comparing prices of your products. If you’re selling six different smartphones, or six different whatevers, they’ll ask themselves which of your six products looks like the best deal.

And that’s where the fun begins. You’ll have all kinds of leverage that you can’t have when selling at Best Buy or on Amazon. You might not need to lower your prices at all. By raising the price of one or two products, you’ll make the less expensive ones look like even better deals by comparison. You can’t do that at Best Buy because you can’t control your competition’s prices.

If your demand curve is elastic, however, you still might be better off lowering prices. It can produce shocking results.

When developer Gunnar Bartels dropped the price of his Sharemouse app from 25 dollars to 10 dollars, his sales and profits went through the roof. Techdirt has the details in a case study, but here’s the money quote:

“Holy cow!” Bartels wrote. Translation: He sold more licenses than the elastic pricing model predicted.

He was understandably skeptical and thought the experiment would almost certainly fail, but he gritted his teeth and dropped his price anyway because you never know until you try.

Be brave. Experiment. Keep trying until you find your own sweet spot.

Artificial Intelligence Can Transform Marketing

Over at the Huffington Post, Emma Rush, CEO of the British marketing agency Chemistry, makes a solid case that the marketing industry can learn a lot from Netflix. “Its algorithms,” she writes, “are used to gauge the success of shows, target relevant creative, package programming for specific people, and even to acquire new programming.”

Netflix knows what you want to watch because it knows what you have already watched. The more movies and shows you watch on Netflix, the more the company “knows” you and the more data its algorithms can churn. If you tend to gravitate toward award-winning romantic comedies, Netflix will suggest, or push, award-winning romantic comedies you haven’t watched yet.

If you want to see an even better model, look at Amazon. It started out as a bookstore, but it now sells just about everything except real estate and cars. You can get the electronic edition of the latest Lee Child thriller, but you can also order bath towels, steak seasoning, a high-tech non-stick frying pan, incense from India, and nutritional supplements. You can also stream Amazon Studios’ original content, such as the terrific police procedural, Bosch, based on Michael Connelly’s novels about LAPD homicide detective, Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch, named after the famous Dutch painter.

Because you can buy, read and watch just about anything from Amazon, the website’s algorithms can collect even more data points about you than Netflix can. Some people find this creepy, to be sure, and don’t want to be tracked by faceless corporations on the Internet, but the truth is that most people like it when retailers know what they want in advance and therefore know how to market to them.

One of the big reasons why Barnes and Noble struggles so much to compete online with Amazon is because when you go to BarnesandNoble.com, the company doesn’t care all that much about what you want to read. It pushes the latest best-sellers instead. Shopping for books at Amazon is the online equivalent of stepping into a brick and mortar bookstore where the owner has known you personally for years and can confidently say, “hey, we’ve got this new book by a fantastic new unknown author, and I know you’re going to love it.”

Compare that to how most websites work. “Three quarters of people are frustrated with websites when ad content has nothing to do with their own interests,” Rush writes, “and as more of our online activity moves to mobile, advertising eating into users’ mobile data plans is likely to become an even more emotive issue.”

Amazon and Netflix are able to provide a deeply personalized experience because their artificially intelligent algorithms have massive amounts of personal data to work with. Few companies—and no marketing agencies—have that kind of data at their disposal right now. And no company or organization will ever know everything about an individual’s tastes and preferences. Privacy concerns aren’t going away. Corporate and government omniscience is naturally resisted by huge numbers of people and probably always will be.

It’s nevertheless likely that the massive amounts of time marketing strategists currently spend pouring over mind-boggling amounts of data will eventually be outsourced to intelligent algorithms like those used at Netflix and Amazon. Advertisers may never have as much data to work with, and human intelligence backed up by years of professional experience and judgment can probably never be replaced by a marketing robot, but artificial intelligence is still in its infancy. We’re at the very beginning of a trend here, not the end.

“Netflix data didn’t create Breaking Bad,” Rush concludes, “and there was no data that could have predicted such a storyline would work. That was down to the show’s creator Vince Gilligan and his desire to rewrite the traditional ‘rules’ of a TV series. What Netflix is very good at, and what brands can learn from, is how to set up systems overlaid with human creativity. Systems that identify, in real-time, the various ways people engage with programmes, allowing brands to make faster and more confident decisions about what to show, to whom, and when.”