I was invited to speak about Designing Products & Propositions for the Youth Market by Luke Mitchell of Reach Students at “Youth Marketing Stategy 2011”.
There was an interesting mix of speakers covering the youth market from a number of different perspectives; ranging from insights, marketing and creative agencies, community management and viral marketing to universities and graduate recruiters. This was a great place to share my insights about the youth market and to encourage all these players in the youth space to create learning opportunities for young people through their projects.
Here is the presentation that I gave. It gives many examples of how I have engaged young people in the design of youth products and the value that created for the producers.
Here are some further highlights from the day:
Educational Institutions
Brunel University showed how social media can be used in educational institutions. They had run focus groups to get some initial insights. Great opportunity here for one of my pleas… run co-design sessions with students and the project team. Start by sharing the intended business objectives and benefits. Move on to exploring and identifying the user benefits with the students and then to brainstorming user stories (Scrum reference) as you go. “As a user I would like to ….. so that …” Then co-design the user experience of products, systems and processes together.
For me, traditional “focus groups” are often not focussed enough.
- The participants feel like the fish being watched in the bowl so are often not natural in their behaviour. Smash down those viewing gallery windows and get the client in the room!
- Participants feel that the researcher is wanting a particular answer and the session will often become a “guess the right answer” game.
- Before going to research, the researcher / client will usually have done quite a lot of work designing the proposition based on assumed user needs – so save time and get in with the user early on to test any assumptions from the start.
- Often clients will take the output of a focus group and months later, they may return and test out their solutions. No! Keep going back – preferably every 2 weeks, within a scrum structure, and get users to sign off what has been developed as you go. Again, this will save time, money and effort.
Helen Pennack, Head of Marketing & Communications, University of Leicester is an award-winning marketer who has been developing a portal and integrated social media marketing plan to both attract potential students and provide support to existing students at Leicester University. She heavily engaged end users in the design and the community management of the portal. Another one that is worth a look and another way to help young people develop their real life skills and CV build as they go.
Not going to Uni!
Spencer Mehlman of notgoingtouni.co.uk provided a particularly refreshing and pragmatic alternative view to graduating and not finding a job. Here is the leading paragraph from their website which says it all: “…So you’re thinking about not going to uni. Congratulations! You’ve just proved that you’re not afraid to think differently. Contrary to what the masses may say, university isn’t the only path to success. From apprenticeships to debt-free learning, there are literally thousands of other opportunities out there…”
Do Students Matter in Youth Marketing?
Ben Marks and Melanie Cohen of Opinion Panel gave some good reasons to engage students:
1. It is a population that’s large enough to matter
2. They are enthusiastic early adopters who take products viral
3. Student trends have always lead the way
4. Today’s students are tomorrow’s wealthy citizens and opinion leaders
Opinion Panel run online real-time moderated focus groups. The benefits of this method are that groups can be run with users from different locations and that many insights come from the conversation between users rather than those between moderator and respondent. Trick here is to make sure that this is an appropriate method for the key questions that you have. A good researcher will gain a huge amount of insight by looking in to the respondents’ eyes – some questions will always need to be face to face.
James Eder from Studentbeans.com gave a very engaging talk on how they have the largest student subscriber base in the UK for research through their special discounts and offers incentives. They work with many brands to solicit student opinion. Again, this is online.
And for a great finish…
Get Tom Scott to speak at your event – I cannot think of anyone that could help your event finish on such a big high. Google him for examples of his viral successes. Importantly, he encourages us to try lots of different approaches, not to settle on one. This way we have more chance of succeeding.
All in all this was a good conference and I hope that Luke does another one! As with all conferences, not all the sessions were useful for everyone as it was quite diverse around the sector, but there certainly are possibilities for them all to create real life learning experiences for young people and I hope that they do.