Teens' response to marketing

Loyalty and the teenage market

Jane Pritchard: The teenage market is incredibly fickle.  They change constantly. They change their fashion, their style, the way they present themselves. So they can have that same impact in terms of their loyalty to a brand. Some brands though stay through the teenage years and go beyond adulthood as well. So brands such as Nike, Apple, Amazon have made the transition from appealing to teens all the way through to those teens becoming adults. 

I think the recipes for success from a loyalty point of view come down to a number of factors. The first thing is that you have to actually ask teenagers to participate in the development of your brand. So that’s in terms of the product development and also in terms of the way that you communicate with them.  So asking their opinions on new products, asking them how you communicate to them in the future is a really important way and obviously social networks are a great way of being able to attain that information.

Another area that you have to consider when you’re trying to maintain loyalty with teenagers is that you need to constantly evolve your messaging. They change constantly. They change overnight their opinions on different bits and pieces, so if you stay the same and present the same message to a teenage market they’ll get bored very easily. So you need to constantly evolve your messaging and the excitement that you bring to them. 

The final thing about actually creating loyalty with a teenage market is all about entertainment. They are interested in experiences. They want experiences that they can talk to their friends about, so as a brand you need to deliver that. So every piece of communication needs to be thought of as a piece of entertainment, and if you think about it in the terms of just pushing messages you won’t succeed at actually communicating with this particular audience.

Teenage action and direct mail

Jane Pritchard: I think from a DM point of view the first thing that you need to consider is the world of a teenager, so you need to understand what motivating messages are really going to trigger that teenager to actually react. 

The first kind of key motivator from a teen point of view is appealing to their individuality. They want to be seen as an individual. They want to be seen as special. So from a DM perspective you have to really tap into that. Now direct mail is great from that point of view because it allows you to really bring to life the personalisation within a pack.  So showing the teens that you understand them and you’re tailoring that communication exactly to them. 

The second motivator is about social bonding. So teens want to socially bond with their peer group.  They want to be known as a popular person. So any DM messaging really needs to tap into that as well. So anything that you can provide that’s tangible within the DM pack that allows them to actually share that with their friends, almost show off to a degree is a great way of communicating with teenagers.

Vouchers, for example, are a great way of doing this. It’s something that’s tangible they’ve got in their hands and they can share that with their friends to say, I can get X amount off this brand or product. And that gives them social currency. So, in summary, two very essential messages that need to be included in DM. The first one is to appeal to their individuality and the second one is to make sure that the communication allows them to socially bond.

Successful RAF teenage campaign

Jane Pritchard: A successful teenage campaign for TMW is the RAF Altitude programme. The RAF approached us about three years ago about targeting a younger age group than they traditionally had looked at.  So primarily they’d looked at targeting school leavers and they wondered for example could we target an even younger audience than that to start to build an understanding of what the RAF is all about and obviously maintain that loyalty potentially when they get to make the decision about their future career.

So we set about setting up the programme and looking at the different types of needs of teenagers from as young as 12 all the way through to 18 and we decided on setting up a different stream of activity for those different types of teenagers.  So the younger audience it’s very much about entertaining them and giving them information that really excites them about the RAF all the way through to when you get slightly older, ie that 15, 16 year-old age group, starting to introduce more understanding about the careers potentially that the RAF can start to offer that individual. 

We’ve looked at really exciting creative to be able to deliver this and obviously the programme is called Altitude, which was actually decided on because we wanted to communicate the fact that being part of this programme was a really exciting thing to be a part of and potentially it could actually help you rise above the rest when it comes to your peers.

The types of communication that we’ve delivered include a welcome pack.  Now the welcome pack is award winning, it actually is focused around providing an aerial shot of the area that that individual actually lives in, so you can see how personalised we’ve looked at getting to target those individuals. In addition to that they receive regular magazines and now we are developing an online solution as well, so the opportunity for them to open up the dialogue even further with the RAF.

All in all it’s been hugely successful.  We’ve had a lot of positive feedback and it has actually resulted in achieving ten recruitments to the RAF.  Now that for quite a young programme still is quite an achievement and I’m sure that the success will continue to grow.