Page 138 - 100 Great Marketing Ideas (100 Great Ideas)

65 TAP INTO THE SOCIAL
NETWORK

Getting through to Generation X and Generation Y consumers
is a difficult task at best. They are marketing-savvy (more than half
of all Americans have been on a marketing course of some sort, and
Britain is not far behind), and cynical about conventional marketing.
They seek control of all their interactions with companies, and have
been brought up with the idea that the consumer is king—they are
certainly not easily manipulated.

They have also been brought up with the internet. Anyone under
the age of 30 has trouble remembering a world without cellphones
and the internet, and virtually all of them are computer literate and
regular net users. They have no difficulty in setting up software to
block pop-ups and banners, so advertising to them in any obtrusive
way is somewhere between difficult and impossible—yet at the same
time they will consciously seek out information about products.

This combination of factors is causing a revolution in advertising
and promotion generally. Traditionally, advertising consisted of
a series of unsought communications, i.e., communications the
consumer was not looking for, aimed at persuading people to buy.
Now, advertising has become largely sought by the consumers, and
its aim is to “nudge” the person to buy one brand rather than another
when they are already 99 percent committed to buy.

But how to do the nudging?

The idea

YouTube has been one of the phenomena of the twenty-first century.
It allows people to post and share videos on the internet, and literally

100 GREAT MARKETING IDEAS • 129