Young, brand-savvy and online

Rania Abouzeid

• Last Updated: August 13. 2008 10:25PM UAE / August 13. 2008 6:25PM GMT

Finding out what makes brand-savvy teenagers tick has always been a challenge for the marketing industry. But now if you want to get the inside information on the shopping habits of youngsters, there is only one place to go: the internet.

About 30 per cent of the Middle East population are between the ages of 15 and 19, according to the World Bank – the largest proportion in the region’s history – at a time when record-high oil prices mean the region is flush with funds. In Saudi Arabia, the largest Arab economy, the under-30 figure is more than 50 per cent.

With those sorts of demographics, it is clear why young Arab consumers are becoming an increasingly important segment to marketing executives. But do companies really understand today’s teenagers and what they want?

Not really, says Hermann Behrens, the Middle East chief executive of the global branding consultancy, The Brand Union.

“I think that generally there’s a need to completely drop all the paradigms and to rethink the youth market and how we tackle it,” he says. “You need to completely reinvestigate and get much closer to your consumers to develop the insight that you need.”

And that means going online. Young people across the globe are increasingly turning away from traditional forms of media – such as print and television – in favour of the internet.

According to The State of the News Media 2008 report by the US-based Project for Excellence in Journalism, last year only 33 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds read a newspaper in an average week, a decline of seven per cent since 2000.

A study released by Nielsen, the global market research firm based in New York, last month indicated that while traditional television viewing continues to grow, people under 35 are increasingly watching video on the internet and mobile phones.

The means of consuming traditional media are changing, and as the number of worldwide online users expands, more forms of media, including advertising, are expected to migrate into the virtual world.

Internet advertising is expected to account for 10 per cent of global ad expenditure this year, up from 8.6 per cent last year, according to the international media group, Zenith Optimedia. By 2010, the group predicts that the medium will attract 13.6 per cent of all advertising.

Ad spending on social networks like MySpace is also climbing. The American market research group, eMarketer, expects US advertising expenditure on the sites to reach US$1.6 billion (Dh5.87bn) this year, a 70 per cent increase on last year.

Although internet ad spending remains in the very low single digits in the Middle East, internet usage in the region has increased 1,176 per cent since 2000, according to the market research site, internetworldstats.com. It went up 281 per cent in the rest of the world during the same period.

But the explosion of online users and forms of media – especially social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and weblogs – has resulted in a highly fragmented audience.

“It’s become more and more challenging than ever to actually segment and profile the youth market, because it’s a moving target all the time,” Mr Behrens says. “The youth are much more spoilt for choice than we were. There’s so much out there that they have to digest that I think the biggest challenge brands have is to actually keep the youths’ attention, and to keep them engaged.”

According to a five-month branding study conducted last year in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE by the market insight company, TNS Middle East and Africa, young people under 25 prefer brands that talk to them in a conversational way, rather than bombard them with messages.

Traditional forms of media such as television and print are not considered engaging enough to a generation that has been weaned on interactive, user-generated sites such as YouTube and Facebook.

Marketing executives should create a sense of community around a brand, for example by hosting a weblog on a product’s website or creating a corporate group on Facebook, says Tammy Jalboukh, one of the lead TNS researchers on the study. “Youth seek to be part of a community, so creating some sort of a community for them and helping them feel that they are members of it and can participate, that they can engage [and] express themselves, will help a lot,” Ms Jalboukh says.

In addition to talking to young people, she says, the researchers examined a variety of sources where youngsters seek to express themselves. “We looked for insights in the quirkiest of places, be it Facebook profiles, weblogs, graffiti or matrimonial sites.”

It’s an approach that marketing executives should be encouraged to take, Mr Behrens says, although he adds that it is still “out of the current comfort zone of many marketers”.

“There is still a lot of resistance to this, but any company looking to channel or direct its marketing spend towards the youth market desperately, desperately needs to become part of the youth world and really live side by side with them and really develop that insight.”

The online social networking sites are clearly where the young people are. Some 71 per cent of online teenagers in the US visit the sites weekly, and more than half say they have participated in advertiser-branded interactive activities, according to the findings of a report by the Alloy Media + Marketing company, based in New York.

Although many companies from a variety of industries host profiles on social networking sites like Facebook, their effectiveness hinges on keeping young people engaged.

“There are a lot of companies that are starting these initiatives, but I don’t think a lot of them have cracked the market,” Mr Behrens says.

A study conducted in June by the global market research firm, JupiterResearch, found that online marketing executives in Europe and the UK “simply don’t know how to market properly within social networks”.

“Too many marketers create dull, non-interactive pages inside social networks,” says Nate Elliott, the research director at JupiterResearch and lead author of the report. “Our research clearly shows that ongoing promotion and advertising, as well as the use of even relatively simple forms of engagement, are vital to the success of branded social networking pages.”

According to the report, half of advertiser-branded social networking pages in Europe had fewer than 1,000 “friends”.

“Even simple forms of engagement, such as contests, on average doubled the number of friends acquired by each branded page,” it says. Young people are also twice as likely to visit a branded page focused on media content that includes video, contests and other interactive elements than a branded page that focuses on products.

Ms Jalboukh says her research indicates that driving young people towards a company’s profile on a social networking site or other online medium is not enough. Companies have to keep them there by “giving them an avenue to express themselves and be part of a company’s product – its marketing message”.

“Their attention span is very short, so they lose interest very fast,” she says. “You have to engage with them.”

rabouzeid@thenational.ae