Manhattan Marketing Maven

3 UXD Factors Changing Strategic Planning

User experience design (UXD) is breaking out of its native digital niche becoming a critical element in marketing strategy. Understanding the full range of consumer experiences with a brand is a critical factor in building awareness, engagement and advocacy and in framing or evolving a value proposition that integrates and romances features and benefits in believable and sustaining ways. 

UXD is changing how brands approach strategic planning and how they develop customer insights. Once thought of exclusively as a digital concept, UXD promises to stitch together what consumers say with what consumers actually or habitually do to create insights that will suggest how messages are framed and where messages are transmitted and received. 

In apply UXD principles to integrated marketing programs, consider these 3 key factors. 

End-to-End Planning. It’s not just about the product or the transaction. People want to buy into brands not just buy stuff. You need a longitudinal perspective on the process. Anticipate and plan for information needs, feelings and functionalities at every step from the first glimmer of an idea in your prospect’s mind through the completion of a successful interaction and onto the next one. Every customer takes a journey to identify and interact with your brand. Map it. Think about it and carefully decide when, where and how you will have opportunities to shape the sequence, the messages, the offers, the incentives, the rewards, the confirmations and the back sell communications. 

Frictionless Interactions. The holy grail of UXD is to make every interaction simple, easy, intuitive and rewarding. It’s a very tall order, which requires alignment of all your resources to figure out where the likely hiccups might occur. Understand who your prospect is, what they are after and how they go about getting it. Then design your engagement mechanisms. 

Ethnographic research, rapid prototyping, task-oriented testing, in situ observation, eye-mapping and careful interviewing are the preferred UXD techniques which when married to focus groups, qualitative and quantitative research and customer data can deepen or supercharge a brand’s customer insights. The more you get into her head; the better. The more you understand her context; the better. The more you understand her workflow and her coping devices; the better. The more you anticipate where and how she’ll be hesitant, confused or doubtful; the better. 

Create Visual Cues. Too many brand experiences are like driving in New Jersey; under-marked and confusing. Develop plenty of visual cues to orient and direct prospects and customers. You can never reinforce where they are and where they are heading too much. Think of the customer journey like driving the interstate highway system. Anticipate where prospects will get antsy, where they need gentle reinforcement, where they need a big honking sign and when they need confirmation that they’ve gone in the right direction or made the right choice. 

The integration of UXD with traditional strategic planning will create a more accurate and powerful tool for brands to build deeper customer understanding, intimacy and loyalty.

 

4 Ways to Engage Millenials

Every younger generation knows better. Every younger generation wants to un-do, reject, fix or repair the mistakes made by their elders. Every younger generation brings its own POV to the party. 

Seventy-five million individuals born between 1981-2000 grew up with computers at home and at school, are beyond the tricks and techniques of advertising and wield enormous buying power. Millennials are better educated, more diverse and better at multitasking that their Boomer parents. They’ve been indulged, encouraged, pampered and have different expectations and sensibilities than their elders. Catching their attention and involving them in a brand isn’t easy.

Consider four ways to open the conversation: 

Give them instant access and status. Collaboration, shared responsibility and consensus constitute their worldview. Millennials want to be taken seriously and have both a voice and vote. They expect to weigh-in on the key issues regardless of rank, tenure, status or skill set. They don’t want to be bossed around and expect to be included in every relevant decision. They reject hierarchy. Seniority and tenure are dirty words. They don’t want to be bored or have to work their way up along a well-trodden path. 

Maybe this is a presumption unique to this generation. Though, I doubt it. It feels like the same youthful enthusiasm that newbie’s have always brought to the party. The plea for immediate inclusion, access, status and respect is characteristic of people not yet burned by the system, circumstances or peers. Vaguely socialist, it’s a good but naïve starting point. 

Personalize a user-driven experience. Raised as digital natives and gamers, it’s all about the intuitive experience where there are always several ways to solve the puzzle and where the best idea always wins. They want cool design and easy navigation to deliver end user benefits. And they want to be able to adjust the level, the design, the content, the frequency or intensity according to personal preferences.  They watch TV on a laptop or a tablet as they text their friends, create custom iTunes music mixes and play Xbox games against unseen opponents in China.

These are different expectations from Boomers or other generations. Millennials gather and process information differently. Nothing is linear in their world. They live out loud and freely share information among themselves. They embrace new technology and new devices instantly. Used to multi-media, non-linear data displays and multi-channel multi-tasking, they experience the world differently. They owe no loyalty beyond the next experience and demand constant improvement and re-invention from their favorite brands. 

As a result those seeking to communicate with them have to engage them on their own terms. This requires a different construction and parsing of content as well as a radically different approach toward fundamental concepts like reach, frequency, media channels and engagement. 

Eco-consciousness doesn’t matter. It’s a nice-to-have but not a cornerstone of their worldview. They assign the responsibility for saving the planet to business rather than to individuals. But as they better understand the trade-offs between business efficiency and ecology or humanitarian causes, they are willing to make fiscally friendly decisions. The global economic crisis forced them to recalibrate their expectations and their spending habits. Efficiency and value trump causes.  Evidently, the younger crowd isn’t much different from the rest of us in this regard. They are more than happy to live in the moment and pass on the consequences of their actions to the younger generation. 

It’s about character not celebrity. Raised in a celebrity culture, Millennials reject direct endorsement and the cult of celebrity preferring instead to relate to the characters portrayed rather than actors portraying them. They snicker at faux celebrities like the Kardashians and discover and embrace home-made YouTube stars. Used to selecting images and qualities to represent themselves, they reject the obviously manufactured personalities shoved down their throats by media and marketers. 

Millennials demand the right to anoint their own celebrities and esteem peers or personalities found worthy by crowdsourcing or by other more “democratic” ways. Stars are still stars for the younger crowd with all the volatility, vulnerability and hype that goes with it. Maybe this is where social networks, word-of-mouth communication and peer-to-peer recommendations play the biggest role rather than relying on traditional tastemakers or star-makers. 

The younger generation will inherit our jobs and our economy. Understanding their formative experiences, understanding their needs and perspectives will determine how successful they can be at digging us out of our economic troubles, re-inventing our business models or bringing about the revolution we all clamored for when we were their age. 

 

 

5 Insights from Inventors

Inventors think about things that don’t yet exist; that aren’t there. They operate on a different frequency. 

They iterate, incubate, massage, manipulate and relentlessly test ideas. They seek to fix things and fill voids. Some ideas are radical, some incremental, some innovative, some ingenious, some inventive, some derivative, and some inexplicable. Some become prototypes though far fewer become viable products. 

Inventors can’t rest and can’t except the status quo. They have to fix it, find it, create it, built it, fabricate it, re-route it, re-wire it and make something new. 

Here’s 5 marketing lessons these guys taught me. 

Experience is Everything. We are sentient creatures. How we feel determines what we want and what we do. Feelings drive us. Marketers have to communicate or stimulate feelings to move the needle. 

Everything is Filtered.  There are no fresh or new experiences. Language, culture, experience, media and context filter everything. Every communications choice – words, color, image, music, tone, face etc – hits pre-set buttons which condition the response. 

Before we start, some part of the target audience has already made up their mind.  Each individual brings a huge bag of pre-judgments to every experience and every message. Knowing nuances and idioms, improves our chance for breaking through. 

People React Predictably. There’s no better barometer of human nature than watching random consumers react to something new. You can almost see the mental gears grinding as people sort, filter, file and compare the new thing against their stored databank of information and experiences. 

Some are surprised. Some instinctively point out the flaws or speculate about the downside while others instantly riff on the new thing suggesting features, changes, colors, applications and functions to make it better. 

By understanding and planning for the spectrum of predictable reactions, marketers can anticipate how we experience the new and to shape both the initial presentations and the follow-up messages. 

We Live in a Tower of Babel. It is very difficult to frame a single idea and communicate it to a wide range of people who come from different places, think differently, use words differently and hear differently. The inherent difficulty of framing and transmitting commercial messages hits you in the face. There are few common understandings about what is funny, cool, sad or ironic. 

It’s All About Differentiation. What’s new, what’s different, what’s better and why should I care are inventors’ and marketers’ challenges. If it isn’t different or different enough it dies. Marketers must exert as much effort and creativity into positioning and framing the difference as inventors must in creating something different.  

 

A Tale of Two Tweets

The content, conversation and cadence of Twitter are unique and distinctive from its social media cousins. What’s less clear is how brands can tactically enter, participate and influence the Twitter stream to build awareness, preference and advocacy. 

A leading tactic is to borrow equity and reach from celebrities or from Twitter itself to accelerate the rate of engagement and interaction. By sponsoring tweets or by hiring celebrities with large followings to tweet on your behalf, brands hope to align themselves with customer and prospect sensibilities, find a quick way to enter the conversation using the appropriate language and get their message, with an articulated or implied endorsement, out to the largest number of Twitter users fast. 

Many brands are experimenting with these tactics and Twitter has devised a menu of sponsored tweets both to encourage brands and monetize their platform. Consider two examples. 

The Premium Sponsored Tweet. The top-of-the-line media buy on Twitter, this vehicle puts your message at the top of the “trends” list in the right hand column. The topic is bolded and accompanied by an orange box with an arrow in it and the word “promoted” alongside. Since Twitter claims 100 million unique daily visitors this ought to be the bees knees of Twitter communication; massive reach. 

In our experiment, a full day of a promoted tweet yielded less than 1000 new followers and less than 2500 re-tweets, comments or interactions. Evidently users accessing Twitter by mobile device (roughly 50 million) don’t see promoted tweets. For others, the “promoted” tag signals an ad and prompts immediate disregard. Yet at comparable costs, the result was significantly worse than the celebrity Tweet. 

The Celebrity Tweet. The value of this turns of three key variables; the genuine appeal of any given celebrity to a brand’s target audience, the number of followers a celebrity has and the content and frequency of posts. In our case, we chose second tier celebrities, who we could afford, and who would appeal to a broad range of customer interests like music, sports, skateboarding, comedy and gossip. 

The average celebrity tweeted 5 times over a week with our message in his or her own voice. The average celebrity drove 2200 followers and 5200 re-tweets, comments or interactions; roughly double the results of the Promoted Tweet. The top performing celebrity drove 8700+ followers. If the goal of using Twitter is gain awareness and engagement leading to brand preference and/or purchase, go the celebrity route first.

Dan Zarella also raises the value of words and symbols in engaging Twitter users. His latest research based on 200,000 tweets containing links found: 

• Hastags (#) don’t influence click thrus.
• The word “via” drive 3X re-tweets
• Using @ in a tweet, triples its click thru rate
• RT in re-tweets increases CTR
• If you say “please” you get a 50% spike in clicks
• Tweets with the word “marketing” in them generally get lower CTRs. 

 

 

Why Living Social Will Crash & Burn

National advertisers are extremely skeptical about daily deals. They abhor the 50/50 split, they doubt the targeting capabilities and they are convinced that deal shoppers either don’t return or won’t ever again pay full price. 

But the real reason Living Social and the army of also-rans will fail is that they don’t know how to engage agencies and sophisticated marketers who can provide them the credibility and scale they crave. 

After months of convincing my client that these guys provide value and can engage customers who don’t consider their brand, we craft a test plan in a key Southwestern market. The logistics and operations of getting a Living Social deal designed and approved are kluge-y. The initial design comp omitted their logo. The reps seem inexperienced and mostly clueless.

Following a yeoman effort at sell-in, we prep the clients, hold endless conference calls, salve internal political and personality disputes and get everybody prepped to handle inquiries, social media reactions, PR, purchases, redemptions and potential competitive responses. All eyes within the huge national client organization are on this pilot deal slated to run on Monday. 

Thursday night before we push the button, we are told that it has to be pushed back to satisfy some arbitrary new policy cooked up by Living Social’s management. Everyone on our end goes bat shit crazy. None of the daily deal guys understands why this is a big deal. Now nobody cares how it turns out. 

Moral of the story --  If you want to play with the big brands you have to understand our world and service us in context. You need us more than we need you.

 

Marketing Branded Apps

There are 300,000 mobile apps that have been downloaded 10.9 billion times. The average smartphone user has 22 apps, the average feature phone user has downloaded 10 apps. iPhone fans lead the way with an average of 37 apps. 

Every one of them raises our expectations about content, connectivity and functionality. But in spite of the rapid development and proliferation of apps, we are still in the very early stages of app design and development. Too many consumers expect too much too fast for marketers and IT guys to keep up. 

The idea of an app suggests connections, possibilities and uses that we can only dream about technically. We are just beginning to develop apps that use and leverage the native technology in phones – GPS, cameras and accelerometers and mobile payments are right around the corner. We are just scratching the surface in terms of user interface design and workflow management. And we have way too little understanding of how people actually think about and use these apps. 

At the moment, many brands are struggling to package and develop the absolute minimum app content and functionality. The basics include a store locator, product specs and descriptions, availability and pricing, some kind of 2-way communications channel and basic facts and information about the brand. Consumers would be surprised at how difficult it is, from a systems perspective, to organize this fundamental data around a somewhat easy and intuitive navigation and design scheme. 

Even if a brand can get this combination of content and functionality together, it’s a baseline, and possibly a “me-to” app. Connecting the dots and transporting the data is a huge technical and organizational challenge for most retailers. Data is usually siloed and collected, stored and secured in different formats for different purposes. The opportunity to create an app often exposes bureaucratic fault lines, multiple systems that don’t talk to each other and IT shortcomings that are understandable in context but frustrating to those eager to embrace and deploy the latest technology. 

Joe Tedeschi recently reviewed a bunch of retail apps in the New York Times and concluded that some retail apps make the shipping process marginally less frustrating and costly. "The better ones suggest that they can help you find an item in the local store. Some also offer prices on those goods, but they’re often inaccurate." After evaluating apps from Best Buy, Target, Home Depot and the Westfield Mall, he half-heartedly concluded, “The apps didn’t fail us completely.”

Its no wonder that 1 in 4 apps downloaded are never used and that a second app is probably used once or twice and abandoned.

Given the evolutionary state of apps, brands need consumers to buy into the app development process rather than buy into the current release or current version of the app. Hyping the debut of an app will boomerang and most likely disappoint consumers with high expectations and slight technical knowledge. 

Here’s how to enroll your customers in your app marketing program: 

Set Expectations. Be humble and realistic. Don’t promote your app as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Present yourself as a pioneer and cue your customers to expect a good-better-best progression of services from you. If you can share the loose timeline, though don’t promise firm delivery dates. 

Gather Customer Input. Borrow Google’s loose definition of “Beta Tester” and enroll your early adapters into the process. Solicit their input and ideas. Get your employees involved and talking about app development, too. Give associates and consumers guided tasks and ask them to give you feedback. Ask for suggestions on colors, labels, sequences, buttons and other user experience elements. They’ll know what’s intuitive and what’s easy much faster and better than you will. You’ll be surprised by how much energy and goodwill your brand has and how many good ideas you collect. 

Be Transparent. Let your customers know your dreams but also your reality. Explain what you are going for and how great you expect the final version to be then tell them what it will take to get there and the challenges you face. People rally to reality. Many are more than willing to give you latitude and genuine help along the way. Consumers know that technology is evolving, is hard to master and is costly. Senior executives think this approach shows vulnerability and exposes potential weaknesses. But savvy marketers understand that investors already know the weaknesses, which are offset by how this tactic demonstrates the humanity of a brand and engages customers directly. 

Communicate. Once you start app marketing, keep going. Issue progress reports. Expose the people working on the app. Share test data. Call out people using the app and merchandise their tips or work-arounds. Everybody likes to be part of building something great. 

Apps are exciting and cool. Marketing them can also be exciting and cool if you are real about the process and open with your customers.

 

American Express' Anti-Loyalty Program

American Express has devised the ultimate anti-loyalty program. They take their best customers and have idiots torture them by phone. In no time, you want to cut up your card and scream “AMEX sucks” into the biggest megaphone you can find. If you doubt me, just trying booking a trip using Membership Rewards. 

Note to readers: If you aren’t up for a rant, bail now! 

Here’s how I entered AMEX Hell. I’ve been a Platinum Card holder since 2003 and I amassed 200,000 membership rewards points. Over the years I’ve paid bills with the card, flown extra segments and generally hoarded reward points thinking they have extreme value. 

So now, humbled by an extreme winter, I fantasized that I could redeem the whole lot and add my wife’s 100,000 Gold Card points for a great, free sunny vacation at an ultra-lux resort. Thus began 6 hours of phone calls over 4 days that resulted in no bookings and 30-45 minute passing relationships with Valerie, Cindy, Amanda, Tamika, Damian, Victoria, Toby, Kareem, Sally and Hovi, who subjected me to endless repeated verifications, put me on hold forcing me endure the world’s worst Musak, disconnected me, told me wrong or contradictory information or seemed entirely clueless, as if they never really talked to a sentient human before.  

It all began with a call to the Platinum Concierge, where I entered a maze of corporate silos. Evidently Travel, Amex.com and Platinum Travel are different entities with different properties and rates. They don’t talk to each other. Agents in each silo don’t know the rules or parameters of their silo or the other silos. In several cases, after being disconnected we got conflicting information and different rates for the same property. When the travel people warm transfer you to the Membership Rewards desk everything goes to hell in a hand basket. 

First, you wait on queue. Amex to Amex agent transfers get no priority in the phone queues, so you have an accompanied waiting experience. Then the Rewards people tell you that they don’t have partnerships or deals with the properties that Travel does so your basic plan, that you spent an hour hammering out, is un-doable. Then they tell you the real value of your Rewards (my 200,000 points was worth $1500) and your blood pressure spikes and you feel like the biggest chump in the world. 

When quoting rates, I asked if AMEX got special rates, deals or packages. Only 1 out of 4 agents even understood what I was asking about it. With each passing second, I realized that there is no added service, no special or personalized treatment, no inside deals, no savvy travel insights and basically no value proposition to having a Platinum Card. As explained by Amex’s own agents, each offer has so many complicated provisions, restrictions and requirements that you walk away thinking the whole system is a switch-and-bait scheme and that AMEX has a vested interest in keeping you from getting the prize. 

In a world where consumers expect seamless and immediate access to information and advice, this system is designed to confound, confuse and stymie customers. It is the antithesis of customer service.

Maybe my expectations were out of line, but a 10 minute call, prompted online from the Westin website got me a vacation at the same place, at a better rate with a few extras thrown in. Evidently membership doesn’t have rewards.

 

Get Serious About a New Job in 2011

At the dawn of 2011, too many of my friends and colleagues are still unemployed or underemployed. And many are stuck in jobs they hate because the job market seems frozen. In the spirit of making next year better, consider Kim Bishop’s new book, Get Down to Business and You’ll Get the Job, as a tool for change.

Full disclosure. Kim is a friend of mine. I respect her experience and expertise. She gave me a free copy of the book.

Kim Bishop has been on both sides of the table and as a result has written an effective handbook for job-seekers at all levels. Jam-packed with tips and suggestions, links to online and offline resources and practical advice to calm your nerves and focus your search, this is the book for anyone who wants to get their next job early in 2011.

Bishop understands the landscape, the hiring mentality and the tools you need to work the system in your favor and she explicitly lays out a fact-based game plan anyone can follow. Lots of these "get-a-job" books are full of self-serving opinions and motivational hype. This one isn't. It's realistic, practical, accessible and do-able.

She has a system, complete with its own acronym, which takes the emotion and the kvetching out of the job search equation. Her basic message is to treat job search like a job, be disciplined, follow-up and know your product and your market.

Sounds intuitive. But for most people anxiety about skills, money and public face short circuit effective job searches. You probably know a lot of the stuff she lays out. But there are many little nuggets and data points that come from her insider bag of tricks.

This book won’t guarantee you a new or better job, but it will give you a competitive edge and arm you to work the system much more effectively than those other 500 guys competing for the same post. It’s an $18.98 investment with a positive ROI.

The First 5 Things to Do in 2011

Is that a computer in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? 

Cheap smart phones, 4G, zillions of apps, the ascendance of Android, the coming proliferation of tablets and the general ease and utility of being always connected are transforming consumer behavior. 

For many, especially Zuckerberg and his minions, Facebook is becoming the Internet. Almost half of all smart phone users access social networks from mobile devices not to mention actively using search, web browsers, Skype and comparison-shopping apps. These usage patterns will accelerate at faster rates than ever before. 

To hit the ground running and use these trends to your advantage, do these five things first in 2011. 

Mobilize. Be sure your site is properly rendered on mobile devices and loads quickly and successfully. If you haven’t built a fully functional mobile site; now is the appropriate time. People in-motion have zero patience for sites that don’t work or can’t help them on-demand. Arranging seamless wireless access to your best content has to be top priority for 2011. 

Do Basic UX Work.  Mobile and social media have had a major impact on holiday shopping. Understand how, where, when and why your customers are using these channels and figure out how you fit into these new behavioral models. This is a basic, hardcore user experience exercise that you can’t afford not to do. 

Can your brand withstand or win at in-store price comparisons? Can you trigger mobile coupons by time or location? Can customers get your best stuff on their mobile devices or while they’re with their pals on social networks? Does your brand have leisure or gaming appeal? What is your physical and emotional proximity to your customers and prospects and what do you need to do to place your content organically and credibly into their lifestyle or life stage work flows? 

Consumers expect to be able to engage with brands in two-way conversations across channels. Mobile and social media intensify and deepen this desire and add the expectation that brands will know them personally; their interests, preferences, purchase histories whenever or however the connection is established. Brands need to evaluate their data and processing infrastructure, CRM and Customer Service capabilities and privacy safeguards in anticipation of much more fluid and dynamic customer transactions, encounters and relationships. 

Syndicate.  Branded websites are necessary but not sufficient marketing assets. Websites are becoming like 800 numbers; expected but contingent and underutilized. And since few brands can spend what it takes to compete with semantically optimized platforms or to change naturally occurring traffic patterns, smart players are fishing where the fish are by placing branded content and functionality on portals, on social networks and in other places customers and constituents congregate. 

Look at resource and technology allocation with an eye toward messaging productivity and engagement. Does it really makes sense to crank out a brand blog that 26 people read or would it be better to take that connect and use it as guest blogs or blog commentary on highly trafficked blogs or discussion sites?  Similarly would you improve customer engagement by implementing Facebook Connect and sharing single sign-on and data with your customers in a different context? 

Focus on Like-ability. The profligate use of the “Like” button changes the equation. A “Like” is temporary and conditional. It’s no longer necessarily a statement of brand awareness, preference or loyalty. A “Like” is no longer the equivalent of a “Fan” a “Follower” or a “Friend.” Instead it’s a momentary vote of confidence that isn’t necessarily transferable or projectable.  

This calls into question the need to or value of accumulating likes.  The value of likes, either to the people who like you or those who observe their friends’ choices, is uncertain. They can like you big time and always or like you for a particular thing or in a distinct moment. Collecting “Likes” as a success metric or as a barometer of brand strength is much less clear and forces a re-evaluation of what brands want from the people they encounter in social media. 

Tune-Up Search. Every brand can quickly and inexpensively pick-up extra free traffic by tuning up their natural search asserts. Check ALT and image tags, headers and sub-heads, pathways, redirects, align body copy with page titles and headers and re-submit to directories. Typically these are the niggly tasks that get left till the end of site construction or deployment and frequently fall through the cracks. It’s a few hours of work for a big pay off.  

 

4 Perspectives About Millenials

Every younger generation knows better. Every younger generation wants to un-do, reject, fix or repair the mistakes made by their elders. Every younger generation brings its own POV to the party. 

Mr.Youth and Intrepid Consulting have put a bunch of US and UK millennials under the microscope by engaging them in projection exercises, surveying them and analyzing their digital ethnography to produce some insights into what they want, how they think and how to engage, manage or sell them. Titled Millennial Inc. – What Your Company Will Look Like When Millennials Call the Shots,” it gets you thinking about the younger people you work with and the target audiences you seek to influence and persuade. 

Consider four of the provocative notions discovered: 

Collaboration, shared responsibility and consensus rule. Millenials want to be taken seriously and have both a voice and vote. They expect to weigh-in on the key issues regardless of rank, tenure, status or skill set. They don’t want to be bossed around and expect to be included in every relevant decision. They reject hierarchy. “Seniority and tenure are dirty words.” They don’t want to be bored or have to work their way up along a well-trodden path. 

Maybe this is a presumption unique to this generation. Though, I doubt it. It feels like the same youthful enthusiasm that newbie’s have always brought to the party. The plea for immediate inclusion, access, status and respect is characteristic of people not yet burned by the system, circumstances or peers. Vaguely socialist, it’s a good but naïve starting point. 

They expect a personalized, customized, user-driven experience. Raised as digital natives and gamers, it’s all about the intuitive experience where there are always several ways to solve the puzzle and where the best idea always wins. They want cool design and easy navigation to deliver end user benefits. And they want to be able to adjust the level, the design, the content, the frequency or intensity according to personal preferences. 

These are different expectations from Boomers or other generations. Millenials gather and process information differently. They live out loud and freely share information among themselves. They embrace new technology and new devices instantly. Used to multi-media, non-linear data displays and multi-channel multi-tasking, they experience the world differently. 

As a result those seeking to communicate with them have to engage them on their own terms. This requires a different construction and parsing of content as well as a radically different approach toward fundamental concepts like reach, frequency, media channels and engagement. 

Eco-consciousness is not a driving factor. It’s a nice-to-have but not a cornerstone of their worldview. They assign the responsibility for saving the planet to business rather than to individuals. But as they better understand the trade-offs between business efficiency and ecology or humanitarian causes, they are willing to make fiscally friendly decisions. Evidently, the younger crowd isn’t much different from the rest of us in this regard. They are more than happy to pass on the consequences of our actions. 

It’s not the celebrity; it’s the character. Raised in a celebrity culture, Millennials reject direct endorsement and the cult of celebrity preferring instead to relate to the characters portrayed rather than actors portraying them. Maybe this is an avatar boomerang where kids used to selecting images and qualities to represent themselves reject the obviously manufactured personalities shoved down their throats by media and marketers. 

This doesn’t feel entirely true. Maybe its more about millennials demanding the right to anoint their own celebrities and esteem peers or personalities found worthy by crowdsourcing or by other more “democratic” ways. Stars are still stars for the younger crowd with all the volatility, vulnerability and hype that goes with it. Maybe this is where social networks, word-of-mouth communication and peer-to-peer recommendations play the biggest role rather than relying on traditional tastemakers or star-makers. 

The younger generation will inherit our jobs and our economy. Understanding their formative experiences, understanding their needs and perspectives and then calibrating our reaction to them will determine how successful they can be at digging us out of our economic troubles, re-inventing our business models or bringing about the revolution we all clamored for when we were their age.