Investing in the youf generation

Not that long ago, no teen even had a mobile phone, and those adults who did were ridiculed for carrying around a small power generator and a technological brick. Now the age at which our children 'demand' a mobile, (as some sort of right, like clean air or pocket money) is plummeting fast.

Now, we see the internet marketing world afire with ways to personalise mobile content, market to the text generation etc, and considerable investment in ways to capture that immature market share.

However, this 'immature' market is a whole new generation with a different take on what is worth spending money on and what isn't, and I wonder just how deeply into those heads and that culture the marketers etc have gone.

Although there has always been considerable surprise expressed at how people will pay for a snippet of a song eg a ringtone where they will not necessarily be willing to pay to download music eg the whole song, it would seem that the age of information etc on the Internet being free may have spawned a generation who believe everything should be free.

Ask most teens whether they will pay to download a ringtone now, and they will look at you askance and ask,"Why pay? You can get them for free." Ditto if you replace 'ringtone' with 'music'.

No matter to them whether there is law breaking going on with copyright infractions etc, these teens are of course outside of the law usually because of their age, but also seem to be almost entirely unaware that bluetoothing to a friend a song that you downloaded last night over a torrent is illegal. To a teen, there is no visible crime, not understanding, as of course they don't, how the copyright, DRM, royalties etc world operates.

"Why is it illegal? It's just a song she wants that I have."

And with word of mouth and mouse being rife amongst that generation through their use of MSN, Skype etc, it doesn't take long for a new source of freebies to go viral amongst their peers. The playground jungle drums have always been effective in transmitting new trends but with the use of online chats etc, viral amongst that age group can be almost instant.

And the big pull is FREE. Anything free attracts tight-fisted teenagers by the bucket load. So, to me, for any business seeking to get market share in the youth market, the first thing to do is brand the product line as FREE and work out how you can capture these greedy little monsters for their lifetime, build them into loyal cutomers (never minding that for some time they are going to be unpaying customers) and run loss leaders until their credit cards start to work online and the need/desire/want turns into a capitalisable asset.

Building email lists with their addresses won't always work because many of them change email addies as frequently as they swap their SIM cards. Most of them lie like hairy eggs about their real address as this is what their parents advise them to do to prevent stalking etc. So, picking them off at Facebook, MySpace and building loyalty through Second Life and other virtual worlds, social networking sites etc may prove to be the only way forward.

And that means mastering the existing hot sites, and keeping up to date with the new ones. Without becoming predatory, or breaking netiquette.

I wish you luck! Having two of these mercenary little buggers myself, I advise my clients to come up with products for the other end of the maturity scale - the silver surfers with high disposable income!