How Do Businesses Cut Corners When It Comes to Getting Your Attention? | QDaily Research Lab

Brands take the position that “this was made just for young people” or “I’m already getting close to young people” — and sometimes you’re just not buying it.

Whether by choice or by necessity, businesses that have woken up to young people’s spending power are all working hard at (looking like they’re) catching young people’s attention.

This isn’t easy, of course. One fairly obvious reason: the younger generation’s views and tastes are simply too different from those of the consumer group that used to dominate, and it looks hard to boil them down to many traits where “everyone is the same.”

So what about the broader trends?

A while back, American Express teamed up with the consulting firm Forrester on a survey, asking 1,027 North Americans in Generation Y (ages 23-37) and Generation Z (ages 16-22) about their views on the consumer experience. Gen Z, arguably the youngest cohort of consumers there is, brings these new attitudes to brands and businesses:

• A stronger sense of “brand,” and more attention to a brand’s reputation: do they stop to think about what kind of brand this is before placing an order? 50% of Gen Z care about a brand’s image and reputation, higher than Gen Y’s 42%.
• Gen Z and Gen Y name the same top three reasons for blacklisting a brand: besides making people spend more money and safety problems, the third is bad news about the brand.
• They like interacting with brands on social media, and can be a little thin-skinned about it: when they run into a problem and contact a brand on social media, 21% of Gen Z will stop buying that brand if it doesn’t reply or if they don’t like the reply — far above Gen Y’s 9%.
• If a problem can be solved online, they will not pick up the phone: compared with Gen Y, Gen Z far prefers getting brand information through app notifications (22% more) or social media (23% more) rather than text messages, email, or letters, and far prefers contacting a brand by online chat over a phone call (100% more).
• Even for problems they could handle themselves, they’d rather not talk to customer service: the number of Gen Z consumers willing to sort things out by text message or through the self-service menu on a service line is also twice that of Gen Y.
• And yes, they care what a brand looks like online: besides wanting brands to reply promptly on social media, they also let an app’s design and ease of use affect their mood about buying.

Businesses have noticed the shift too. From developing new products to building a brand image to marketing and sales, there’s now a point in the process where young people get thought about. All kinds of verified corporate accounts, ones you’d expect and ones you wouldn’t, have moved onto every common social network, jostling to appear in your timeline; anything that can be handled online pretty much has been moved there; and a lot of fashionable phrases are getting more attention than ever — lifestyle, community engagement, scenario-based experience, touchpoints…

Unfortunately, to young people this kind of attention sometimes looks like wishful thinking. Brands take the position of “this was made just for young people,” “I’m talking to young people,” or “I’m already getting close to young people” — and young people aren’t buying it. Some moves meant to win young people over even achieve the opposite.

What does this copy-and-paste “youthification” look like? In QDaily Research Lab’s surveys and observations, we found the following:

Physical products try everything to look more “high-end” or more “down-to-earth,” but often come off as all surface, or just cheap

The common impression is that young people like new breakthroughs and are readier to try new things, so some products now feel obliged to reach for new concepts and new language when they’re developed and promoted. But grabbing high-frequency words that are already on everyone’s list of tired tricks and using them as a gimmick is far too crude.

1. Home goods, or everyday kitchen appliances like rice cookers, absolutely must be stamped with labels like “high-tech” or “smart” — and if the product itself isn’t that convenient, the label counts against it instead. Being able to play background music and calling that “smart,” for instance, is fobbing people off.

2. Does a claim about good quality at a low price always win people over? We found that it doesn’t. What people least want to see is a rock-bottom price and a “youth edition,” because they know those mean not good quality at a low price but cheap quality at a low price. The “youth edition” of an electronic product mostly means “downgraded specs plus flashy extras.”

3. Besides these, slim, black tech, bezel-less, and entry-level also made the cut in our survey on “which words are you sick of seeing in electronics ads?”

4. The moves that once counted as “just put it out there and people will bite” have a shorter and shorter half-life, and sit one step away from being a tired trick or a gimmick. Food with “no preservatives or additives” printed in a prominent spot, skincare selling “fragrance-free” or “alcohol-free” — none of it tempts the way it used to.

5. The China-themed collections international brands use to cozy up to local consumers have become an annual punchline: adding a bit of red or a zodiac animal and expecting that to count as closeness. Rejected.

Internet services and apps look like they were designed for young people, but how they’re designed deserves a lot more thought

Young people like solving problems on their phones, so both new startups and established companies are building apps — and this kind of overhaul doesn’t bring only benefits.

1. You build an app that’s a copy of your website and think you’re now an internet company? One careless step and you get filed under “not good-looking enough” or “reeks of middle age,” and left there.

2. Do more push notifications bring you closer to young users? No — what they hate most about so-called “human-friendly design” is “a push notification over the tiniest thing.”

3. What they can least stand are cutesy push notifications straining to be funny, like slogans built on homophone puns of set phrases, or a brand playing dress-up as a celebrity to seem chummy. Internet buzzwords that sell a concept don’t go over well either, things like “shared XX” and “paying for knowledge.”

4. Do all young people love sharing? In our survey, social features have in fact become the one thing internet services are best off not touching. “I memorized a few vocabulary words on my phone, tapped a few times on the results page, and it turned out I’d shared it to Moments,” or “I checked the weather and got told about events in my city” — that’s enough to make someone furiously delete the app.

5. Do film and TV need to go online too? Our survey found that so-called “mobile games adapted from film and TV” aren’t popular: either the show was already dumb, or the game has nothing to do with the show.

Brands work hard to protect the image they hold in other people’s minds, but some of that effort is useless, or even risky

1. What does a brand do that makes you think it isn’t very high-end? Besides playing tricks with pricing to reel people in, the least liked move is “a domestic brand giving itself an English name and using American or British models to pass itself off as a foreign product.”

2. The brand title people can least stand, by the widest margin in our survey, is something like “Official Partner of the Chinese Olympic Team” — a slogan nobody knows the actual meaning of.

3. A brand ambassador still has influence over a brand; unfortunately these days the influence is often negative. Among young people’s “reasons for blacklisting a brand,” hiring a celebrity they dislike drew even more agreement than a safety scandal. Winning affection with an unreliable, mismatched celebrity who brings nothing but traffic looks out of date.

4. They don’t much like logos. It isn’t only that a logo is ugly, or that the brand image feels a bit cheap: most attempts to put the logo itself somewhere prominent go over badly, unless it’s a logo an up-and-coming streetwear brand is using as a design element.

5. Crisis PR? What young people can least stand is “admitting it only once it can’t be hidden any longer,” or “buying paid posters and marketing accounts to whitewash the brand everywhere you look.”

Advertising and marketing have no shortage of landmines either

Copy-and-paste “youthification,” piling onto every new element the moment it appears, keeps spreading, and some ad formats once considered completely safe are looking dated.

1. Overused bottles printed with one-liners, overused emoji — and the impression left behind is “that was funny, but I can’t remember whose ad it was.”

2. Viral marketing at least used to think about how to create an absurd effect; now brands simply shoot a cookie-cutter mash-up remix video, put it on Bilibili, and call it done — and nobody bothers to click.

3. Deliberately anti-inspirational, on the theory that looking defeated is the winning move. But going through the motions of anti-inspiration — anti-intellectual, sneering at poor people, or just flipping an uplifting line into a gloomy one and repeating it — gets seen through and dismissed just as easily.

4. Faking “earthy cool”: insisting on calling yourself a dog, poor, ugly, or fat in the name of modesty and being relatable.

5. Trying to get close to young people by talking to them, and carelessly turning into a modern-day school disciplinarian who only adds to the pressure. Lecturing copy like “99 places you must visit in your lifetime” or “keep skipping your studies and society will leave you behind!” falls into this.

Why call these moves “cutting corners”? Or rather, what’s behind the corner-cutting?

One fairly traditional reason is a brush-off, an indifference toward young people. As in “doing it the way I always have should be fine,” followed by more out-of-touch titles for yourself and a spokesperson who is right for nothing except traffic. As we said in an earlier piece poking fun at apps that had gone middle-aged, “for these ads and apps, what’s truly bad isn’t being outdated and out of step — it’s having no idea they’re out of step, or being out of step on purpose.”

These days, though, more of the corner-cutting comes from a misunderstanding of what youthification means. Turning young people into symbols, for instance: assuming young people simply “like letting loose, like slang, like nostalgia and retro,” or “like feeling defeated, like bullet comments, like parody, like user-generated content.” After the symbols comes oversimplification — “something that worked well enough for someone else, I can borrow.” So: young people are sick of pep talks and inspirational pap, so just say the same thing in reverse; young people like watching shows on sites with bullet comments, so let’s make a bullet-comment movie.

At which point all young people want to say is: what we like isn’t these things themselves. Take bullet comments. What young people like is the subculture shared by the people posting them, not merely the format of “say something and it floats across the screen.” Once the crowd posting them changes, bullet comments hold no appeal.

So what does it take to get young people’s attention, or at least not lose points?

Stay ahead of the playbook

When they spend money, one of the words young people complain about most is “playbook” — the canned routine run on you. So much so that, if you’re not careful, all sorts of moves get labeled a playbook.

That has also produced a set of tactics you could call the “anti-playbook economy”:

• Everyone else is using additives to make food look better, so I’ll sell no additives.
• Everyone else is talking up “positive social energy,” so I’ll say go ahead and feel defeated, go ahead and slump on the sofa.
• Headlines like “the 10 best body washes” don’t work anymore, so make it “under-the-radar tools that raise your shower elegance index.”

But as we said earlier, the better people get at spotting a playbook, the shorter the half-life of any anti-playbook. The “let loose” and “retro nostalgia” ads people mock today were once a path off the beaten track themselves; by now even anti-inspirational messaging and user comments plastered across subway ads are about to go stale.

To stay ahead of the playbook, you probably have to keep working out what today’s playbook is — otherwise you’re still walking around inside one.

Young people don’t much like sticking labels on themselves directly, but they do like roundabout ways of telling each other apart and recognizing their own kind.

They don’t like a prominent brand logo, because they don’t want to be defined by the brand — though if the logo signals “niche taste,” that’s another matter.

With earthy cool, defeatism, and absurdist humor, what people sharing them want to say isn’t necessarily “this is funny.” It’s more likely “I get what this is about (and you might not)” or “this is me (and you hadn’t noticed).”

Down-to-earth recommendations, not slogans

Which institutional accounts do people actually follow on social media? Besides the joke-tellers and trivia accounts that prove their own humor and taste, the option that drew the most agreement in our survey was “new products and daily deals.”

The ads that win people over most easily are IKEA’s, the ones that make you think “that arrangement would probably work at our place too.”

As for following Alipay’s official account, one reason besides its habit of ignoring the rulebook is that it “talks like a human being.”

Marketing and advertising are built on consumerism, and young people today are, on one side, learning to spot the playbook so they don’t get taken in, and on the other paying closer attention to how much real improvement to their lives the money they spend buys. We’ve said in earlier pieces that young people are no longer the sort who hand over money casually. In how brands shape their own image and how businesses talk to consumers, plenty really has changed. Young people are pickier, and they’re quick to see through — or remember — what a brand says and does.

Quite often, a business’s corner-cutting shows up like this: only in the lines of its brand image and its advertising does it strike the pose of understanding young people, talking to young people, serving young people. The effect is a bit like someone at a big televised gala frantically using internet slang from five years ago. No real effort, and no one is charmed.

Cover image: Lin Xiaoyao