It comes as news to no one that teenagers are highly cynical about
marketing, suspicious of advertising and have an unnerving ability to
set trends even before marketers can invent them.
There are, however, ways to reach this infuriating target group, and
marketers just have to try that much harder, although there are certain
sure-win methods - music, for example.
As singer Bjork once said, "As we become increasingly alienated in our
lives, music may be the only voice we have left".
But as Channel V commercial director Jasper Donat noted at the Teen
Power 2000 conference in Hong Kong, it is crucial to understand how
teenagers are interacting with music these days, not just listening to
it.
"Nowadays, music is so cool and so interactive that it has gone from
passive to active," he said, pointing to websites such as Beatnik, which
uses software that enables users to create and record their own mixes
for popular songs - and these new mixes can then be emailed to friends
or even back to the original artists.
Some marketers have already caught on to the possibilities offered by
the 'Net, including vodka maker Absolut, which encourages viewers to
test their DJ skills by mixing online.
Of course, online marketing is not the be-all and end-all of how best to
reach the teen segment.
"There have been huge fragmentations in the media targeted at Asian
teens, and this in turn is highly filtered by the target itself," said
Mr Donat.
"Time has become a precious commodity - once you waste (teenagers')
time, you'll lose them forever. They'll never come back."
This means that marketing and advertising needs not only to be highly
targeted, it must be totally relevant - this in itself causes problems,
because what is cool and what is not can change on a daily basis with
teenagers.
"It is important to talk to kids all the time," he said.
"Young people today are major commercial influencers in the home. In
China, for example, up to 70 per cent of purchase decisions are
determined by children, compared with just 40 per cent in the US. Youth,
therefore, are very important customers."
The key point in any use of music when targeting teens is to make the
experience as interactive as possible: "They can even interact with
music at games arcades," Mr Donat said, referring to dance machines and
games in which players can test their musical skills with simulated
guitars and suchlike.
Then there have been marketers, mainly record companies, who have turned
the entire concept of artist endorsement on its head by specifically
creating bands as products, who look great on TV but are basically
incapable of writing music or playing their own instruments.
Despite this, the power of artist endorsement still exists, and some
highly synergistic partnerships have been forged.
In recent contracts Pepsi negotiated with the likes of Faye Wong, Aaron
Kwok and Janet Jackson, for example, the line between the artists' music
videos (to promote their own songs) and the product TVC (to promote the
drink) is all but erased, resulting in strikingly similar creative for
both.
The singers' tracks were also licenced for Pepsi giveaways in China, in
which specially-produced CDs were given away for every purchase of a
specific number of cans of Pepsi.
Tie-ups of this nature can have drawbacks, particularly where teens feel
that the product placement is too obvious and the marketing becomes, in
essence, "hostile".
In one case, teens in India were turned off in droves when soft drink
Limka negotiated a highly prominent - and totally out of character -
placement in a music video by a popular singer.
A lot of careful consideration and thought needs to be given to star
endorsement and event sponsorship, therefore.
Channel V and Philips, for example, have just launched the "Face to
Face" project, in which 18 concerts will be staged across China over the
next nine months - and the live element will be given a multimedia twist
with coverage on the radio and Internet.
"Teens will thank sponsors and buy their products, but event sponsorship
has become so much more than just hanging up a couple of banners at a
concert and hoping that the audience will like your product," Mr Donat
said.
