Marketing’s next frontier? There’s a lot of interest in - yet challenges around - reaching the latest hot demographic: the Millenials. Also called Generation Y, there are 70-80 Million of them, born between 1980 and 2000 and are thought of as a generation nearly as large as the Baby Boom. The Boomers babies, perhaps?
“They were raised by doting parents who told them they are special, played in little leagues with no winners or losers, or all winners. They are laden with trophies just for participating and they think your business-as-usual ethic is for the birds. And if you persist in the belief you can, take your job and shove it.
As correspondent Morley Safer first reported last November, corporate America is so unnerved by all this that companies like Merrill Lynch, Ernst & Young, and scores of others are hiring consultants to teach them how to deal with this generation that only takes “yes” for an answer.” The “Millenials” Are Coming
Despite the challenges they present in the workplace, they are a large demographic, with disposable income and a penchant for technology. With every gadget imaginable, they multitask, type, text and chat. Highly collaborative and connected to social media, they are a force to be reckoned with.
We personally don’t think that they call themselves Millenials, but I was surprised to find a mention that several thousand of them sent suggestions about what they want to be called to Peter Jennings at abcnews.com and “Millenials” was the clear winner.
Rocketvox is Coming - Ideal Solution for the Millenials
Working with our colleague Jothy, we are getting ready to launch RocketVox. RocketVox is an integrated InBox - one place to manage all of your email, voicemail, texting, chat and social networking in a single, integrated and confidential web-based InBox.
RocketVox allows you to determine how and with whom, you want to communicate and share information. You control how and when someone can reach you by phone and who can see your personal information online. You depend how you want communications to be handled dependent upon where people are in your relational circles.
As busy mobile professionals, we are clearly interested in simplifying our communications with RocketVox, and will eagerly sign up, but we also believe there will be huge interest from the Millenials.
They are busy and highly collaborative, manage many forms of technology and are becoming all too painfully aware of the lack of security around their Facebook and MySpace lives. Here are some interesting stats from Wikipedia about this demo:
- 97% own a computer
- 97% have downloaded music and other media using the Internet
- 94% own a cell phone
- 76% use instant messaging and social networking sites
- 75% of college students have a Facebook profile and most of them check it daily.
- 60% own some type of portable music and/or video device such as an iPod
- 49% regularly download music and other media using peer-to-peer file sharing
- 34% use websites as their primary source of news
- there are 75 million of them and they spend about $172 billion per year
Our challenge is to get RocketVox into the hands and minds of this massive population. We’ve found that marketing to this segment is a lot of fun and inspires creativity (and should I mention that there is little to no budget for marketing). A team of recent college grads, including Jothy’s daughter and her friends, provide regular input and feedback.
This small cluster of 20-somethings is connected to thousands of their peers through phonebooks and social networks and are eager and happy to share the news of something exciting that they’ve discovered that makes their life easier.
Six Degrees and Counting
We’ve set up groups on all the popular social networks and watch folks join from the six degrees of separation. We’re twittering and spoke-ing and spock-ing and twine-ing and blogging and posting messages on our home pages. One member of our marketing team, recently graduated from college, wrote and produced a video for YouTube - a spoof on the dating game called “You’re Not the One” - setting up the options out there today (Facebook, AIM, Google, etc) and why they are not “The One” to meet the integrated requirements.
Try The Survey
We’ve done a simple survey on Constant Contact to test acceptance of the product concept and have received an overwhelming and positive response with many eager to be involved in the free beta kicking off next month. Start the survey - enter f6kif at the first prompt.
Word of mouth marketing will be key to our launch. As well, we know that the product and the download experience must be easy and flawless. This generation expects technology to be easy and will give just one chance to impress.
A bad experience has the potential to flicker across the web channels instantaneously. This generation expects it to be easy and they have an opinion.
Have you done anything interesting to reach this next hot target market?