This week we take you to the Southern part of USA to look at how a brand like Ford can take advantage of the relationship that trends like the hip-hop infused Slab Culture has with its brand.

Host: Ghani Kunto
Guest: Steve Bayley

The problem with success is that it’s only replicable when all independent variables remain the same.  Increasing your budget on the same strategy that worked before will only exacerbate the problem.  The strategy that got you there won’t keep you there.

Take Pepsi’s example.  The company’s success with the classic Pepsi Generation campaign kept driving it down similar paths.  It would use more up-to-date celebrities, use different advertising channels to capture eyeballs, and throw more money at it, but the basic premise remained the same.  The result?

PepsiCo announced it would spend $1.2 billion over three years to reinvigorate its beverage brands via a complete packaging, merchandising and marketing overhaul. But with 2011 marking the third year since that announcement, news that the Pepsi brand slid to third place surely came as a psychological blow to employees.

from How Pepsi Blinked, Fell Behind Diet Coke

In a painfully comedic twist, when a tweaked version of the old strategy doesn’t work, “branding experts” would proclaim that it’s time to go back to the basics.

The whole reason you modified the old strategy was because you know it won’t work, and now you’re saying you want to go back to it?

Please.

This lost of market share is a wake up call.  Don’t go back to sleep hoping to dream of the good ‘ol days.

They can’t.

What they can do is let their people have dialogue with customers, or better yet, create space for customers to have dialogue among themselves.

Unfortunately, even though customers don’t want a dialogue with companies, companies still try their best to have a “dialogue” with customers.  Qtel from Qatar for example.  It tries to create dialogue by creating a Facebook fan page and asking it’s customers random inane questions:

Sure the page is getting “likes” but dialogue is supposed to be two-ways (otherwise it’s a monolog, right?).  So how exactly is asking “What TV shows are you most addicted to?” contributing to the conversation?  The company doesn’t respond to any of the answers anyway.  The page instead became a place to post things like this:

Being on social media doesn’t make you social.  It just magnifies how (un)social you really are.

Just how much has Facebook become ingrained in our daily social interactions? “Face-stalking” and “Facebook Creeping” has become part of the courting process for youth in USA.  Some parents set up Facebook profiles for their kids to record their early childhood and help relatives stay updated.  There’s even an app for you to send post-mortem Facebook messages (for a final touching message to your loved ones or a conclusive middle finger to the world).

Here’s one person’s take regarding A Life on Facebook.  What would yours be like?

Just how different are youth in different parts of the world?

With internet penetration rapidly on the rise even in the most remote parts of the world, the old model of Attention Economy is being replaced by the new model of Interest Economy.  Youth are congregating based on interests rather than geography.  Consider fans of the television show Glee, or as they call themselves: the Gleeks.  In many ways, a Singaporean Gleek will be more similar to a Gleek in South Africa than she would be to other Singapore youth.

Youth in different parts of the world may appear different in the surface, but when it comes to the things like underlying drivers, optimization of social currency–ie. things that matter–they are much more alike than you might realize.

“Want to sell to young people? Oh, you need to show a kid pulling a skateboard trick over a set of stairs.  Or, better yet, parkour!  Yes, lets show kids jumping from rooftops to rooftops.  Oh, you don’t want to alienate the female segment?  Sure, we’ll have one of them be a girl in the ad.”

The dangers of such banal advertising is more than just lazy marketing.  The bigger risk lays in believing that youth are risk takers.  The truth is, young people are only as risk prone as their adult counterparts.  If anything, they are more adverse to social risk.

FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is an example of this.  As one teenager explained:

For me, the fear of missing out caused me to become addicted and attached to my phone and Facebook. The second I got on the bus after school, I would often browse my newsfeed for interesting stories. For some, FOMO is, in fact, quite depressing. Upon realizing that he or she has not been invited to an event, one often begins to question if their friends actually like them, if they did something wrong, or if they simply are unimportant. Yet, for others, FOMO can be encouraging. For better or for worse, FOMO can inspire people to become increasingly involved in their communities, schools, families, and friendships.

from Radical Parenting: Parenting Advice Written by Kids

Ask any young person whether she’d prefer to meet his friends online or offline, and the answer is clear.

Lena Garzarelli, 13, an eighth grader in Asheville, N.C., who spends as much as two hours each day on Facebook, video chatting with friends and using other multimedia, said that the technology, on the whole, has helped enrich her social life. But she said that she felt it could be a poor substitute for face-to-face interaction.

She has had instances, she said, of serious miscommunication because her real meaning was lost in text-based communications.

When people converse online, she said, they “may not understand how I feel because they can’t see the emotion in my face and can’t hear my voice.”

from Does Technology Affect Happiness in NY Times blog

The whole idea that youth feel more at home using technology to interact with each other is clearly a myth.

An offshoot of this myth is the believe that young people are always looking for the newest and latest technology. Often the opposite is true, and as one YMA alumni shared, if companies like Kodak had realized it, it could’ve been the lifeline that the company needed.

“Apathy.”

That word has been indiscriminately thrown around by adults to describe the youth.  Surprising, especially if you take into account the number social movements that were driven by youth.  Consider Occupy Wallstreet for example.  Starting from New York, the Occupy movement spread across US online and offline.

Consider also the amount of time that young people invest in pursuing their passions.  Judging from the number & the quality of brickfilms (stop-motion video created using Lego bricks), it seems that calling young people lazy or apathetic is just an excuse marketers make when they failed to engage the youth market.

Example: http://brickfilmersguild.com

Imagine yourself as a teen, hanging out with your friends in your room, and your loud uncle suddenly came in wanting to “hang out out with you guys.”

Worse still, he’s wearing a backward baseball cap and baggy pants, and he’s speaking with a hip hop slang because he had “read somewhere that’s what all the kids are into these days.”

Awkward, isn’t it?

Yet brands do this exact same thing by hijacking youth culture and transposing it over their branding attempts.  They hire the latest top-40 artist and insert references to quirky trends like planking in their advertising, and they expect young people to come flocking.

The only thing they manage to do is lose the respect of their young customers.

If you’re a brand in a boring industry–like mobile operator or banking–don’t waste money trying to be cool.  Just be yourself.  Isn’t that what being cool truly is anyway?

Example: Buckley’s cough syrup.  It tastes terrible but judging from the number of youth submitted videos on YouTube, it seems to have quite a fan base.

Some companies are marketing to youth even though they are deathly afraid of them.  They’re afraid that young people will take their brand and start tearing it apart.  They fear that a teen hacker is going to poke holes into their product and ruin in for everybody.

Sure, there are teens out there who just love taking things apart and putting them back differently.  Nicholas Allegra–aka Comex–is a poster child of this.  The 19-year old self-described “Apple Fanboy” had released JailbreakMe 2 and Jailbreak 3, two hacks for the iOS that allowed millions of people to remove all download restrictions on an iPhone or an iPad.

Apple’s response? One that is typical of companies who understand youth marketing.