For marketers, the days of vanilla-segmenting the target audience on the basis of just demographics are over. This is our conclusion from four weeks of cool-hunting and sharing our findings on the aspirations and dispositions and attitudes of people in the age-bracket of 14-34 years.
Today, as a marketer, you are up in front of a group that has no inhibitions about operating on either end of the price spectrum in its consumption patterns. So how do marketers make their brands relevant to this audience? This is a real challenge. As we went around cool-hunting this time, we focused on finding answers to this piece of the brand puzzle.
We conducted an open-ended probe into what makes a brand relevant among 213 people across four metros. We then picked out the top four factors that emerged from this probe, and asked the same set of respondents to rate them. The top four factors that emerged were: The brand talks the same language as I do; the brand shows empathy towards me; the brand is transparent; and most people I connect with talk about the brand.
Of these the most significant one was ‘transparency' with 40 per cent of the respondents rating it as the main attribute that makes a brand relevant to them.
We took our findings to Delhi-based psychologist Dr Aruna Broota to make sense of them and provide a larger perspective. Dr Broota saw a link between all the four factors. She believes we are living in a world where ‘I must know where you come from' is the prime factor that makes one relevant to the other. In fact, she felt all the four factors that topped our probe are a reflection of this acquired attribute in the personality of cool folks.
After this, we did a qualitative probe into these results to find out what led cool consumers to choose ‘transparency' over everything.
The explanation boils down to the connected world that today's youngster lives in. Urban cool folks spend a significant part of their lives in the virtual world. But the virtual world today is far removed from the lonely and restricted world that a computer-addicted young-urban-upwardly-mobile used to inhabit even a couple of years ago.
Now modern devices are pushing folks to connect and stay connected always. Everyone is connected, sharing and listening. The cool folks have become social freaks and have a compulsive need to share every single thought and feeling. They are living their lives openly and there is this mass coalescing happening that defies demographics. No wonder they are so transparent and no wonder they demand transparency in return. This explains why they relate to brands that are transparent and talk to them or empathise with them.
(Giraj Sharma is an independent brand consultant and a compulsive cool-hunter.)