Turn the teen into a lifelong customer

Thomas Husson | September 28, 2005, 06:26 AM

Almost 10 days I haven’t posted anything on this blog. I travelled for business and attended a conference in Barcelona last week, where I led a 3-hour interactive workshop at the second annual conference…on “Mobile Service Strategies To The Youth Market”. Interesting and surprising title for a conference. Far from VoIP, convergence, mobile music or TV…Most of the attendees were marketers from mobile operators all over the world, particularly from developping countries where under 25 may represent more than half of the potential subscribers.

It means mobile operators begin to segment their offers and that’s good news for the industry as a whole. They started to market technologies then moved to services and now try basically to target consumers! Vodafone recently launched Simply, aimed at 40-60 year olds and Passport, aimed at tourists and business travellers. Telefonica also launched a new product offer targeting families. Big operators begin to be serious about segmentation and they are all the more right to do so that they have invested heavily in building CRM systems.

The difficulty with the youth market is that teens love brands. Large international players may not be the best positioned to launch sub-brands (a good example for this is HI from KPN in the Netherlands) since they try to generate economies of scale in advertising with a single brand. This let a room for strong brands that have the marketing know-how to target young people. A good case study for that is The Mobile Factory in Belgium, the mobile brand from TMF (the music TV channel from MTV). They know how to talk to the youth without trying to use a youth language. Kind of a tricky exercise, but hey not everybody is MTV…

Many classical issues were discussed : the importance of the device as a cult object identifying them, the search for the best deal, the role of their community and of buzz/viral marketing, the importance of self identify (blogs, ringtones,...) and so on.

One was missing. When evaluating the ROI of their investement, most operators forget to include loyalty. Youth do not necessarily provide short term profitability, but their ability to develop products that drive profitability for the mass-market as a whole is huge : they have a higher demand for communication devices, they are early adopters of new technologies and they are family advisers !

So the only question is how to turn the teen into a lifelong customer?