The 2008 recession has had a profound impact on all Americans and significantly changed the budgets and spending habits for everyone – regardless of background. There are numerous valid points used in arguments that my generation, the Millennials, have had it the worst since this “great recession.” Overall joblessness is between two and three times higher for 20-somethings than older workers and according to a Pew Report released in 2013, a third of Millennials are living at home with parents. My generation has entered the “real world” in debt, particularly student loan debt, which infamously eclipsed credit card debt in 2012 at $850 billion. Paying back that debt will be a tough challenge – resulting in a not-so-bright future for us. That said, why would a company like Sprint target Millennials, or as they call them, “can-doers,” so aggressively? What makes this market so appealing?
First, it may be helpful to explain who Millennials are. Defined as those born between 1982 and 1993, this generation is now in an age range between 18 and 29 years old. Roughly 77 million strong, the Millennial generation is larger than the Baby Boomer generation and three times the size of generation X.
Millennials are a diverse group, more racially diverse than older generations and are less religious and highly educated. A fact appealing to Sprint, 92 percent use smartphones, tablets, or laptops to go online, compared to 57 percent of all adults. Our consumer behavior has been shaped by the recession, and the importance of Millenials cannot be underestimated. As Baby Boomers move closer to retirement, Millenials will take with them close to $400 billion in annual spending. This leaves a void that will be very difficult to fill and an opportunity for companies like Sprint to capitalize off this generation.
Despite the effects of the recession, Millennial purchasing power is on the rise. According to Jayne O’Donnell and Kit Yarrow’s book “Gen Buy: How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-Somethings are Revolutionizing Retail,” Millennials have an estimated annual direct spending power of $200 billion and will comprise more than a third of the US population by 2015.
Millennials also embrace new technologies and rely on them to access important information and make decisions, another fact Sprint considers. More than 50 percent use smart phones to do research on products while shopping.
According to a recent article in Forbes, Millennials are a particular buying force in three specific areas: technology, apparel and food. A 2013 MasterCard survey indicated that 53 percent of Millennials ranked technology as their top passion with computer and electronic stores were ranked among their top five spending categories.
The Forbes article quoted Jason Dorsey, chief strategy officer at the Center for Generational Kinetics, who said mobile phones reflect the level of status for Millennials — showing they have money to spend.
So how should a company like Sprint market to this group? Marketing has evolved into a more complex job than ever with even higher demands for those trying to reach millennials. In an article entitled, “Marketing In the Moment: Five Ways to Target Millennials,” Alyse Lorber provided the following tips:
- Keep the conversation going or it will keep on going without you. Online conversation is transforming the entire creative process and the way organizations operate. Conversation is constant. Organizations must pay attention to it and provide timely, instant feedback. There is no longer any other option.
- Be willing to prepare and invest in this preparation. Investing in the necessary resources is vital to planning for big moments and engaging with younger users in real time. As it turns out, during the infamous Super Bowl XLVII blackout, Oreo employed a hefty 15-person social media team to respond to whatever happened online during the game. Oreo also planned ahead with two different versions of its tweet that went viral beforehand.
- Assume they are watching more than one screen. A survey taken prior to the 2013 Super Bowl found that about 36 percent of viewers would be consulting on a second screen. Responding with speed to your audience in real time through relevant social channels is a perfect way for brands to reach millions of consumers personally and emotionally on smartphones, computers and tablets during big cultural moments.
- Fish where the fish are. When targeting your Millennial audience, it’s important to find where they are spending their time online and how these trends change over time. The convergence of mobile and social has become a way of life for brands to connect with this overly stimulated and hyperconnected generation.
- Leverage real-time data. Marketers have two valuable tools: historical data, the evidence behind what this younger generation cares about, and real-time data, which is pouring in by the second.
- Raw numbers from “likes,” “comments” and “retweets” give brand marketers the ability to evaluate information by the second. By leveraging both, they can find their place in the conversation and create culturally relevant moments.
In conclusion, despite the 2008 recession, Millenials are a very important market that companies such as Sprint should definitely focus attention on as they are estimated to spend more than $10 trillion over the generation’s lifetimes. Connecting with this group is not rocket science, but it does require some innovation and thinking outside of the box. Marketers that make it easy for Millenials to interact with their brands, each other, and the wider web community will succeed. If you make interacting with your brand fun and authentic, Millennials will reward you with continued purchases as this generation continues to recover from 2008.