Why Millennials Are Changing the Marketing Landscape – Here’s Why #41

The term “Millennial” has both positive and negative connotations. Whatever your feelings towards them are, you need to pay them both attention and respect if your marketing plan has any chance of success, especially considering they are on the verge of being part of the largest transfer of wealth in history.
In today’s episode of Here’s Why, Eric and Mark will walk you through the dos and don’ts of marketing to this emerging sector of the population.

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Full Transcript:

Eric: Hey, check this out!
Mark: Don’t Market me bro!
Eric: Millenials, they can be very challenging to Market to. But that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about in today’s episode of Here’s Why.
Mark: So Eric, who or what is a Millenial?
Eric: Well, the textbook definition is that it’s someone who came of age in the year 2000, so 18 or so, right about 2000. But when we’re talking about Millenials in this video, we’re really going to be talking about people who’ve adopted a millennial type attitude to the use of technology and the availability of information and all those kinds of things.
Mark: So you or I could have certain millennial attitudes, even though we’re not of the age group.
Eric: Right, because we’re nutzoid about our phones and things that we do online, so, yes, we could qualify.
Mark: Ok, so what are the unique expectations of the Millenial mindset?
Eric: It’s interesting because there’s so many different things that are unique. So they expect high quality and they’re very demanding on the quality point of view. And of course, you’d say that was true of people shopping 20, 40, 50, years ago too. But what’s different today is their ability to see the alternatives that are available is so much greater that they have the ability to be more demanding about the quality of things.
Mark: Lots of choices.
Eric: Yes. And they also don’t like to be Marketed to. They want to see things that are educational or entertaining or engaging. Things that make it worth their time to spend time on your pages. Even if they’re there to buy something. They also look for a high level of authenticity, so it’s really pretty easy for them to recognize when someone’s being inauthentic or not genuine. And again as I said before it also relates to because they’re so many other people doing it the right way.
You know I mentioned the engagement thing, “well gosh, why do I need to be engaging?” Well because your competition is, and they’re using that to create brand and relationship and reputation. And they also look for speed. Speed might be as simple as if they Tweet something related to your brand, they look for really fast responses to that, or your web page needs to load really quickly; there’s many different kinds of speed. And again it’s because if you don’t offer it, there’s somebody else who will.
Mark: So how do we Market to Millenials?
Eric: Well the first thing that’s important to understand is you basically need permission to do it. In other words, you’re only going to be able to Market to them if they let you, so they’re very demanding in this kind of regard. So, if you start thinking about what that means, in referring back to what I said before, you have to find a way to entertain them or educate them or engage them and make it worth their time.
So even the process of doing the research that they need before they make a purchase of something, helping them with that process in a way that’s easy to consume and understand and benefit from. And they also look for experiences online and they want to have relationships or feel like they have a relationship with a brand. Which by the way to be fair, having a relationship with a brand might mean that they just see you publishing a lot of good stuff and they develop an affinity for you because of it. It doesn’t mean that every single one of your potential customers has to have a long conversation with you. And then you also have to think about your place in the Marketplace you have to stand out in some regard.
To me, there’s two major ways to do that. One is to be the best, or at least one of the best, or the cheapest or arguably the one that’s the most local or easiest to get to. So those are really the kinds of ways you can stand out. If you’re in the middle of those zones and trying to be a bit of each of those, it’s not really a good spot. Then one last thing I want to mention about this is the need for honesty and openness. So you see what’s happened recently with Volkswagen and the diesel, arguably that was a lack of authenticity and not very honest and open and they took a big hit.
Mark: Yeah, now it occurs to me Eric that some of our viewers might think that the Millenial age group is not their target Market, not their most likely customers, but as we said in the beginning, it’s really more of an attitude that is pervasive even with older people. But also, even those Millenials in that specific age range, they’re beginning to take over aren’t they?
Eric: They are, so to take that in two parts, yes, people like you and I have a lot of attributes, shopping online like a Millennial does because we have that level of connectivity. And then in terms of the buying power of the Millenials, I’m going to quote something, or at least take a factoid from Duane Forrester, and that is that the Millenials, over the next couple of decades, are going to inherit seven trillion dollars of wealth.
Mark: Wow.
Eric: Seems like most businesses ought to want a piece of that.
Mark: Yeah you know, two percent of that, that’s all we ask for right, we get a little chunk of that, that’d be nice. Thank you Eric for these insights about Marketing to Millenials. And if you’d like to know more about this topic, please check out the link that we’ve got on your screen right now, Eric’s got a great slide deck about that and some more details that you can learn about Marketing to Millenials.