The Hindu Business Line : It’s great to be young!

There are a whole host of choices that today’s youth can splurge on. Do they buy a snazzy mobile? Do they head out to the beauty parlour? Do they stuff themselves at the local chaat outlet? And where is the window of opportunity for your brand in this maze? How do you get noticed? How do you influence behaviour?

From left: Simeran Bhasin, Brand Manager – Fastrack, Titan Industries; Shumone Chatterjee, MD, Levi Strauss (India); Fazle Naqvi, ED, Landmark Group

Have you read P. G. Wodehouse? I am sure you have. Even if you have not, let me talk about a character called the ‘Oldest member.’ He is an integral part of the golf stories that the great writer wrote with such amazing ease. He was a repository of wisdom that few wanted to partake of. He was a storehouse of stories that few wanted to listen to. But more than anything else, he was the oldest member in the golf club which was the setting for most of the stories that happened.

I felt a bit like him a few days ago when I was the chairperson in a panel discussion on youth marketing that our company brand-comm had organised in Bangalore. Thankfully to bail me out, there were three other practitioners on youth marketing who not only shared their insights but also brought down the average age of the panel!

Fazle Naqvi, Executive Director, Landmark Group; Shumone Jaya Chatterjee, Managing Director, Levi Strauss (India) Pvt Ltd; and Simeran Bhasin, Brand Manager - Fastrack, Titan Industries, shared their views, learnings and nuggets of consumer insights with a large audience of marketing and advertising professionals. Here is my take on the words of wisdom that we had the good fortune of listening to. If I have added my own two bit put that down to, well, old age. Even the oldest member has privileges!

Numbers? Real or myth?

No account of youth marketing in India is complete without reference to the overwhelming number of young people in the country, pointing to significant marketing opportunities. And yet Fazle had his reservations about the actual size of the market. He said that despite the hype, the numbers are reasonably disappointing. It is nowhere near the 250-million-mark that marketers and media so casually talk about. A sobering thought for those who make business plans and projections based on the youth market.

So, are marketers chasing a chimera? One hopes not. But whatever the size of the demographics, one needs to remember that youth is a state of mind. Today’s Indian youth is global in outlook and exposure, thanks to the media proliferation.

But it is important to remember that they do not ape the West. Unlike my generation which was probably not as proud of its Indian heritage as it ought to have been, today’s kids are proud of their Indian roots and their role models who are patently Indian. People like Dhirubhai Ambani and Sachin Tendulkar, who have made it big here, are their role models. They also seem to be influenced by the Karan Johar effect of “believing in conforming rather than rebelling.” Remember, ours is a country of arranged love marriages!

How do we reach out to this market? The answers do not lie in the past or in our own pet theories. Let us be willing to start from scratch. Let us observe. Humility is the need of the hour. Let us shamelessly watch the youth. So that we can be proud winners at the market place.

What works? What doesn’t?

Today’s youth has been affected by a variety of factors. Music videos, reality shows, Bollywood, and a host of new career options. Dance trainers, to name just one rare breed! A far cry from the boring engineer, doctor, IAS officer choice of yesteryear.

Today, India is confident enough to create its own fashion and not wait for it to trickle down from the West. No hand-me-downs in fashion please. “We can create our own,” says today’s India’s youth brigade. What is wrong with kurtis or boot-cut salwars? They have created their own lingo and a generation born to a technologically challenged generation is on to social networking as they have taken to technology the way a duck to water. There is a need to understand the changing youth and communicate in a manner that is interesting to people whose attention span is a mere nanosecond. Remember that it is multiple-processing, time-compressed, value seekers that we are talking about. ‘How many you have?’ works as it is telegraphic, grammatically incorrect and right up their street.

My generation too has become sensible and decided to be friends with its children. After all, they might well decide whether we live at home or in an age-old home! So autocracy does not work. Not by a long shot!
Implications for marketers!

While youth does seem to have a lot of money we need to remember one thing as well. There are a whole host of choices that today’s youth can splurge on. Do they go to PVR with their significant other? Do they buy a snazzy mobile? Do they head out to the beauty parlour? Do they stuff themselves at the local chaat outlet? And where is the window of opportunity for your brand in this maze? How do you get noticed? How do you influence behaviour? Fastrack found its market share gr owing significantly the moment it dropped its prices and widened its range. Other brands have discovered the value of popping up in front of the consumer in the unlikeliest of places.
Observation the key

Marketing managers today have an inherent disadvantage. They are in their mid-forties. Well, to look at the brighter side they are better off than their CEOs who are in their fifties! And the consumer? Well, she is in her twenties. So what is the solution? Shumone has a simple solution. “Just sit in Brigade Road and watch kids.” Now, that is not a licence to ogle but really a way to address the challenge that we face today.

The trends are happening in front of our eyes. The trick is to market on the basis of trends rather than trying to create them. Yes, sometimes we get carried away by the power of our own rhetoric and try to be super-humans. We are not and let us not even try to be that. Otherwise today’s youth will quickly bring us down to earth with a bang.
Goldmine or landmine?

Today, the demographics in favour of youth are mind-boggling. Yes, India is a young country. While we can quibble about the size or the purchasing power, the size is still extremely interesting to a host of marketers both global and local. Yet many brands have bitten the dust in their quest to crack the youth market. Probably some of them were ahead of their time. A few others might have got their pricing strategies wrong. But the time is right for many others to get in and stay in there. While each marketer will have to fight her own battles, the important challenge is to design a unique strategy for your own brand. Engage with today’s youth. Don’t lecture to them. They will switch off.

Today’s youth has seen it all. They are not yet cynical but can soon be, at least to advertising. Does your brand have the capability to surprise today’s youth? Just try it and you will be surprised by the disproportionate results. People believe that their own children are unique but they still make the mistake of classifying the youth market as similar to their children. Seems a bit wonky to me. Go with the wide-eyed innocence of youth when you wish to engage with them. Be willing to eat humble pie. Learn from your observations. Keep experimenting. Don’t look backwards. Learn from your consumers. In the ‘new’ ‘young’ India might well lie your future. Are you ready? If not someone else is.

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