The Millward Brown Approach
Don’t say we didn’t try.

In the ceaseless search for simplicity, we ask Eileen Campbell, CEO of Millward Brown for a single measure to encapsulate brand health: “We aren’t really advocates of single number measures – the same way you wouldn’t monitor your personal health with a single number.” Sounds reasonable.

Instead, the philosophy behind BrandZ, their brand health tool/framework, is to measure the strength of the consumer bond, says global brand director Peter Walshe: “Consumers have relationships with brands, and the intent is to strengthen those relationships.”

Strength is derived from a couple of (exotic-sounding) metrics: ‘bonding’ and ‘voltage’.

Bonding refers to one of five levels that indicate the strength of the consumer bond. It is based on factors such as: spontaneous awareness, knowledge, relevance, performance, and perceived competitive advantage. For example, the lowest level (weakest bond) typifies a consumer who is simply familiar with a brand and nothing else. The highest level (strongest bond) reflects a consumer who regards the brand as relevant to them and way ahead of the competition.

And voltage? That, says Walshe, reflects how effectively consumers move up the bonding levels. Strong brands tend to have high conversation ratios between the levels.

Interbrand and Landor
Global brand consultancies Interbrand and Landor also run brand health monitors. But they do so for brand valuation purposes as well as for brand/RoI optimisation.

Interbrand launched the first ever brand valuation tool in the 1980s as a way for companies to recognise the intangible value of their brands as tangible assets on balance sheets (a controversial practice at the time but now an accepted financial practice). Our focus here is on the brand strength bits of the valuation tool.

Interbrand’s Rishi Dhir, senior consultant within the brand valuation team, says that seven factors contribute to their strength score. Only three of these are consumer-driven (the rest are judged by Interbrand folks and cover areas such as IP/protection, diversification, etc.). The consumer metrics include: leadership (based on awareness, familiarity and whether the brand ‘acts as a leader’); relevance (how the brand is performing vs. marketplace trends, and the distinctiveness and differentiation vs. the competition); and, stability (loyalty, repeat purchase, level of satisfaction, recommendation, etc.).

“It’s not a particular number that counts, it’s what lies behind that number,” emphasises Interbrand’s UK CEO Rune Gustafson, “It helps clients prioritise touch points and investments.”

WPP’s Landor uses sister company Y&R’s long-standing Brand Asset Valuator (BAV) tool. Landor’s president of Asia-Pacific, Michael Ip, says it uses two ‘pillars’ for strength (differentiation & relevance), and two pillars for stature (esteem & knowledge/understanding).

Efficacy
There are a couple of primary uses for brand health tools, notably identifying a brand’s impact on future sales (i.e. prediction) and measuring/improving RoI (i.e. diagnostics).

Millward Brown’s Campbell says the BrandZ model is “pretty predictable.” Walshe adds that over countless studies, the correlation between the strength ‘score’ and measured sales is at least 65% (r-squared = .65+). In other words, strong brands correlate with significantly higher levels of purchase.

And in terms of diagnostics, Interbrand’s Gustafson says that a study for hotel chain Intercontinental uncovered an unmet need that the chain could potentially ‘own’. They discovered that knowledge was a key loyalty driver: “The [guest’s] disappointment was that they weren’t learning more about the places they were visiting because they were darting between meetings.” This insight led to concierges being brought forward in the decision-making process, and rooms were equipped with ‘5 things you can do’ lists. “Staying relevant and coherent to customers is one of the mainstays of a brand,” says Gustafson.

Issues
All very well, then.

Well, not so quick, says Ian Gee, regional brand planning director, Asia Pacific, at global media agency Initiative. For one thing, he believes that the link between what people say and what they do is ‘vulnerable’, particularly nowadays: “Research is very bad at predicting the future, particularly during an uncertain [economic] period.”

While this is not a direct retort to Millward Brown’s correlation between brand strength and sales (because those sales are not self reported by consumers but based on actual data), it does raise the issue of a lag between attitudes/perceptions and behaviour.

A lag that concerns Gee: “People store attitudes that they may sometime want to use to inform brand/product choice. But when confronted with making a choice, suddenly external circumstances have changed so much that the actual decision they make, there’s no relation to the attitudes they may have stored up until yesterday.”

Another issue is differentiation. John Gerzema. chief insights officer, Young and Rubicam, and author of new book The Brand Bubble, reckons that plain vanilla differentiation has had its day: “Consumers don’t just want a brand to be different; it has to keep being different. We call this energized differentiation, the consumer perception of meaning, motion and direction.“ He sees brands as a direction rather than destination, where velocity rather than distance is the key strength metric.

However radical that sounds, Campbell has similar thoughts: “An important measure is a sense of momentum…if the public has a sense that your brand has a positive trajectory, that’s quite a good indication of share growth.”

Emotions
Robert Passikoff, founder & President of Brand Keys, believes that brand health monitors fail by focusing on the rational: “The decision process in brand adoption, engagement and loyalty is primarily emotional (70%).”

This is made worse by his belief that “the rational bits [of brands] are generally undifferentiated, the emotional bits provide the differentiation.”
And using image attribute statements does not help, he says, because the statements do not represent “the emotional elements that resonate within brands…plus, emotions are difficult to articulate with traditional image statements.”

His solution, developed over the past 24 years, involves the use of psychological questions/scales that measure what people believe. The result is a map of engagement (any marketing or communications activity that results in an increase in brand ‘equity’) vs. attitudinal loyalty.
Passikoff claims that “because it is psychologically-based, we are able to see changes to the configuration of categories…and of levels of expectation, usually 12-18 months ahead of traditional research techniques.”

Growth of online
Gee points to the growth in word-of-mouth/online buzz as a development that brand health monitors need to incorporate: “I can see these growing in the future as more of our lives get committed online…that will become probably a stronger measure of overall brand health than the more formalized questionnaire-based tracking.”

Campbell says they are starting to include this activity: “The other thing we are starting to measure are what conversations they are having about brands…are they talking to other people about brands…how much consumer propagation is happening.”

Music, no doubt, to the ears of Mark Earls, author of Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature, and winner of best paper at ESOMAR’s 2007 Congress. He contends that we tend to copy others rather than make truly individual choices, and so when faced with reporting why we make certain decisions/our attitudes, we tend to post-rationalise. For him, understanding how we interact is key.

In general though, Earls is not a particular fan of brand trackers: “Monitoring brand health is a distraction. The real game is not with the brand but with people and their interactions – this is what shapes consumer behaviour, not brand perceptions or relationships.”

Winners and losers
Having opined about the tool itself, a few emergent themes then.

Given the economic climate and pressures, Campbell is starting to scrutinise attributes such as ‘brand willing to pay more for’ and ‘brand that is good value for the price’ on some of her clients’ trackers because “Marketers need to protect the sense that they are providing something special.
“We think it’s particularly important for marketers to try and prevent consumers from switching to lower priced or store brands…we found that the perceived gap in quality between a major brand and store brand is greater than the actual gap…then you’ve set an extraordinarily high hurdle for the brand marketer to get over once the recession is over to get them back.”

In other words, price promotions could be a false economy and ultimately damaging.

“These are great times,” says Gee, “for challenger brands when old loyalties come into serious question. Like Lexus in the 1980s, an S-class car for an E-class price.”

Interbrand’s Gustafson talks of the chaos in the financial sector, particularly in the US and UK. Here, trust in financial brands has been damaged with the resultant loss of significant brand value among financial services brands, some (Merrill Lynch) more than others (HSBC) (as of June ’08).
Landor’s Ip, based in China, believes that despite the reduction in domestic growth rates, there is still an opportunity for Chinese and Indian companies to build share globally. And while Chinese companies currently lack a depth in global management, he believes that companies such as Lenovo are learning fast: “…they were very clever in appointing a CEO from outside the company, and in moving their chairman to New York.”

Future
Reflecting on the future, Campbell suggests that the research industry may well be on the cusp of a new challenge: “I think we went from ten years ago being very good at explaining why something happened…today we’re pretty good at predicting what will happen…what I think clients are increasingly looking for is to imagine a future and tell them how to get there…beyond a single brand and towards portfolio management.”

“You must have mis-recruited me,” says Chris Forrest of qualitative house The Nursery, “I’m not sure there is lots of innovation in qualitative.”

Moreover, he feels there’s no need for innovation: “Qualitative research is quite evolved… a major tool for us is the good old focus group…it’s just a very good way to get people to interact with each other.”

But far from being a Luddite, Forrest is innovating, it just takes him a while to acknowledge this. And that’s not dissimilar from the initial reaction we get from others we spoke to.

So, where’s the innovation?
There are two emerging areas of innovation in qualitative, and both are online: hybrid techniques that capture quantitative and increasingly qualitative information; and, techniques that capitalise on web 2.0 and the increasingly participatory nature of the web.

These reflect some emerging ‘truths’. The fact that emotions play a more significant role in decisions than rational quantitative surveys suggest, hence the use of a hybrid model to infuse the data with emotional feedback. The fact that consumer presence and attention is shifting online, hence the use of online as a data collection method not just for quantitative data. And the extension of ethnographic techniques online where self-expression is abundant.

Qualitative agencies are starting to embrace online. As Sandrine McClure of Reperes (one of the first agencies in Second Life) puts it: “We’ve moved away from the ‘let’s do qual. the way we used to do it and let’s put it on the internet’ to now learning how to do it online properly.”

Hybrid: more than the sum of the parts
So-called hybrid techniques are not a recent innovation. Quantitative practitioners have included qualitative elements in questionnaires for some time to source rich, unprompted data. But here’s the difference: the new hybrid is driven by the qualitative folks.

For Forrest at least, the motive for developing hybrid techniques was defensive as well as progressive: “[we developed hybrid] because nobody is using all the theory we currently have about how the brain works, and we were going to conferences and finding that quanties were raiding the qual. toolbox…to make quant. surveys more interesting – they were taking some of our pie!”

Forrest uses hybrid techniques for brand communications work. They comprise three projective techniques: word association; a proximity/predisposition measure; and a semiotics-based picture sort based on the work of Gerald Zaltman. McClure deploys hybrid studies, which are similarly based on projective techniques, when developing brand platforms for new brands.

Qual 2.0
The humble blog, that bastion of self-expression, has really taken off as a platform for qualitative exploration.

Sven Arn of H,T,P Concept refers to his offering as a ‘focus blog’ and often sees it as a pre-group, a place for consumers to accurately report on product usage and discuss issues ahead of a traditional focus group: “You’re a lot closer to the moment of consumption using this technology…and the great thing about it is it takes place in their own time.” The ability for consumers to upload photos and rich media only adds to its attractiveness.

But why bother with the subsequent focus group at all? Arn says, and others tend to agree, that the humble focus group will be around for a while: “…one thing that we found doesn’t work in a blog…as soon as you start asking lots of questions, it ends up being a question and answer session and people lose their involvement, you don’t get a lot of depth.”

Unlike Arn, McClure often uses her ‘home use’ blogs standalone. Used for qualitative product testing, they are far superior to the paper diary due to their interactivity. In fact she recalls how interactivity transformed the prospects of a breakfast product. During testing most reported that the product was ‘disgusting’. But then one person came up with a preparation method that significantly improved the taste and texture. Needless to say the client was happy with this random act of co-creation!

McClure sees qualitative 2.0 as an enduring phenomenon, and one that is becoming increasingly mainstream among consumers (no longer youth-centric) and agencies.

But let’s balance this unfettered enthusiasm with a clientside perspective. Crispin Beale, recently appointed head of Facts International but hitherto a career client (Royal Mail, BT and a major electronics retailer), puts it succinctly: “online communities have been more successful than I thought they would be.”

Assessing innovation
Innovation is all very good. Clients say they want it. And we know that in competitive markets with a low barrier to entry (i.e. MR), the most innovative players tend to thrive.

Forrest, however, takes issue with the notion that clients always want it: “It’s been a truism in the industry for a number of years that if you want to win a proposal then you recommend lots of interesting methodologies…but the client says they only have budget for the focus groups. You win the project on the sizzle stuff but then they don’t do the sizzle stuff…clients like to feel they are buying something funky.”

Beale takes issue with this: “[As a client] we were always looking for innovation.” And he didn’t buy any of the arguments about innovative techniques being too risky to try: “…it’s very much talking to a network of peers, finding out who’s been using new techniques. Then if something new can give you a competitive advantage, you just try things on a small scale.”

Informed buyers would, Beale says, belong to client networks and discuss the efficacy of new techniques: “…sometimes we’ll say I’ll give it a go and then next time say it’s your turn.” Moreover, “…it’s not just the techniques, it’s the individuals. And if you get individuals that you trust and respect within the industry…then you’re more predisposed.”

McClure provides a balancing view: “Innovating still takes a leap of faith, it takes confidence. [Clients] need to have faith in your agency and confidence in themselves [to be able to sell it internally].” That said, as the number of success stories presented in conferences and publications increases, clients will no longer have to rely on that intuitive sixth sense for internal justification.

And also…
Our panel suggest other areas that are ripe for innovation.

Hy Mariampolski of Qualidata, a specialist in ethnography, has more issues with interpretation than techniques: “Most practitioners don’t have the foggiest notion of how to interpret projective techniques…I’m looking for a higher level of interpretation, not a higher level of analysis.” As an example, he cites a shower study where they tried to understand why a person washed their hair five times, something only made clear through observation. The interpretation, that showering was a self-nurturing behaviour, well beyond basic functional need, fundamentally changed the category.

Beale welcomes more actionability: “…sometimes as an industry we get very, very tied up in specific methodologies, whereas what we should be getting tied up in is how we used those insights to make money or save money.”

Remember ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’? It’s the book co-authored by pre-eminent marketing practitioners including Harvard University’s Doc Searls. It coined the phrase “markets are conversations”.

Well, Mr. Searls is at it again. Not satisfied with inspiring consumers to use the web to redress the balance between marketers and consumers (e.g. via blogs), he wants to move things up a gear. And blogging strategist Adriana Lukas is along for the ride.

VRM…what?
VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management. Put simply it’s the opposite of CRM.

Put less simply, says Lukas, the intention is “to equip individuals and vendors with tools to enable mutually beneficial transactions and to readdress the balance between demand and supply. It doesn’t get your pulse racing!”

The impetus for change, she adds, comes from an intuitive sense of what people prefer.

Consider a street market. Commerce here comprises three elements: conversations, relationships and transactions.

By contrast, online commerce tends to be just transactions, without meaningful conversations or relationships. “Online advertising isn’t really about conversations [it’s one-way shouting], and CRM isn’t really a relationship [it’s about hoarding and potentially mis-using data],” says Lukas.

VRM is therefore predicated on the notion that empowering individuals to take charge of their data (i.e. giving them the ability to decide who to share it with, when and how) will foster better relationships between consumers and brands, and ultimately lead to healthier markets.

A New Era
The inspiration for ‘Cluetrain…’ apparently came from Searls et al ruminating about the different dynamics and rules in the online world, and the inability of brands to adapt. A well-known example is where Dell gave a high profile blogger poor service. Dell’s reluctance to ‘join the conversation’ when the blogger posted about the experience resulted in a major backlash which, thankfully, Dell seems to have learned a painful lesson from.

Perhaps the tide is turning in favour of VRM given the growing support for somewhat related initiatives such as OpenID (single sign-on) and data portability. The latter is designed to ensure vendors do not lock-in consumer data to unfairly prevent or discourage switching. When Searls speaks to marketers he likens data lock-in to people lock-in (slavery), clearly hoping to elicit an emotional reaction! “We have to think about whether lock-in is necessary to managing relationships,” says Searls.

New types of data are also moving online, and vendors may be wise to consider VRM principles. Take Google, Microsoft and their recently launched health initiatives. These are ultimately aimed at holding medical and health records in one place – very scary. Both stress the security of their systems and the benefits for both health organisations and individuals. But these may not go far enough for VRM proponents.

Own Terms
These are early days for the VRM movement. Although Searls is sponsored by his employer, he is open-sourcing development to attract the best and most passionate minds to the cause.

Spearheading progress from her London base is Lukas who, although unaffiliated to Searls, has come to a similar conclusion on the need for VRM: “…it’s a culmination of what I see the web and the social web doing to individual empowerment, taking it further from conversations to transactions.”

Through regular meetings at her VRM Hub, Lukas is developing a web-based protoype to put a practical face on the concept. But further down the road, is there is a risk of VRM stalling if marketers and consumers fail to buy into the concept?

Lukas promotes VRM as win-win. She expects brands to be able to transact far more with those consumers who take charge of their own data. The example she cites is based on her love of wine. If VRM enables her to create a ‘feed’ of information reflecting her wine likes (say drawn from her blog and various websites), and then offer this to a series of wine merchants, she would in effect be providing vendors with both the ability and permission to sell her relevant items. If anyone misbehaves (by spamming, etc.), she could remove them from the feed. The rest would benefit from seeing continually updated needs.

But all this seems a lot of work for the average consumer. Lukas agrees and says that the answer is, once the infrastructure is built, to encourage developers to build compelling VRM applications that individuals want to use.

Breaking news: as far as advertising goes, the internet’s not quite the bad boy it may appear to be.

As Richard Knubben, policy & compliance manager at EASA, the European Advertising Standards Alliance, puts it: “On the whole, internet and new media-related complaints have made up a relatively small percentage of total advertising complaints over the last couple of years, but are slowly rising.”

And according to Christopher Graham, director general of UK advertising regulator the ASA, that’s because people see traditional media including TV as ‘push’ and so uncontrollable by the recipient, whereas new media is more ‘pull’. He adds: “…people have an expectation about the internet. If they encounter some nastiness they just go away… in context, they would probably expect some advertising to be, frankly, raunchier or sexier than on TV.” A conclusion supported by a 2005 research study commissioned by the ASA.

If it ain’t broke…
But while complaint levels are relatively low, complaints do exist. And according to Knubben, half of Europe-wide complaints about advertising on the internet relate to spam and the remainder to everything else internet/new media.

Spam, by definition, is tricky for authorities to control given its pernicious nature.

But it is parts of the ‘everything else’ category that self-regulatory organisations (SROs) are looking to manage. Most complaints here, according to Graham and Knubben, relate to misleading consumers, e.g. airlines not displaying fully inclusive prices.

And where such infractions are committed in conventional forms of paid-for online advertising (banner ads., search listings, etc.), Knubben believes that eCommerce-related cases can be resolved across Europe through the UCP (unfair commercial practices) directive which is in the process of being implemented.

However, one of the issues being debated is whether or not to include corporate websites. In the UK, Graham says, “We’re in the embarrassing position that our third most complained about non-broadcast medium has 90% of complaints that are out of remit [because they relate to corporate websites]…if this continues, it will erode the relationship we have with consumers because they regard it as advertising.”

The fact that corporate websites are not regulated has offered companies a back door. For example, while being banned from airing an ad. on conventional media can impact brand reputation, the free publicity may drive traffic to the company’s website where the ad. can be shown in full, uncensored. Moreover, the reach and low cost of websites like YouTube only makes online even more attractive.

Graham believes that corporate websites being outside a regulatory framework “is a threat to effective enforcement.” But regulating corporate websites could prove controversial. As well as going against the spirit of the internet, opponents would cite freedom of speech arguments over editorial content. Graham is quick to recognise the sensitivities here: “…is it clever for advertising self regulators to say ‘no we don’t go there’ if that’s where the action is in respect of claims or material on those websites that’s clearly advertising…we don’t want to be making judgements on editorial claims in the website.”

Maintaining public trust
It’s not just online advertising’s rise in importance that has driven these deliberations. Pressure from regulators over HFSS (high fat, sugar and salt) advertising has also been a factor.

So the EASA has created a new media initiative to spearhead Europe’s advertising self-regulation efforts. The EC Directorate General for Health and Consumer Protection, DG Sanco’s director general Robert Madelin has organised an advertising roundtable with EASA, the EC and interested NGOs. And in a recent meeting, according to Graham, Madelin “challenged [the SROs] to see what they were doing about new media”.

In the case of the UK, the Advertising Association, responsible for furthering the interests of all advertising stakeholders, has created a working group including a diverse set of experts and specialists to look into future-proofing new media.

Mainak Mazumdar, VP of Measurement Services at Nielsen//NetRatings, probably sums it up best: every time, he notes, someone steps on a Google property, Google gets a bit more insight into their behaviour and, as a result, a bit smarter.

And as attention continues to shift online, and Google solidifies its position as a dominant destination, it is clearly becoming more adept at understanding not only consumer behaviour but also intention – i.e., when you enter a search query, you’re telling Google what you want to see, read, buy, do etc. And Google takes advantage of that to give you ever more relevant results.

So could this understanding one day trounce what MR has to offer?

Google vs. MR
The short answer is probably not. Note the use of the qualifier ‘probably’.

That’s because having canvassed a variety of folks in the sector, none believes Google to be a direct threat to MR.

For example, Gian Fulgoni, chairman and co-founder of online measurement provider comScore, says that Google is more client than competitor, because that’s the only way it can get that all-important demographic profile of its audience.

Plus, Max Kalehoff, VP of marketing for Nielsen BuzzMetrics and a widely respected marketing blogger, believes ultimately that the biggest brake on any Google ambition to know everything about everyone will be a natural distrust of large institutions: “While I admire and trust the many Google people I’ve met over the years, I don’t fully trust the big institution. In fact, there are very few big institutions I trust, though Google does rank pretty high… you just can’t be a true infomediary without unequivocal trust.”

And that’s something that does not work against MR firms because they are many, many times smaller than Google. In fact, 2007 was yet another milestone for Google’s growth. Having floated on the stock exchange in 2004 at $85, it is now well over $600 with a market value of over $200billion. That’s bigger than the next four largest media companies combined. And now temptingly close to it’s arch nemesis, Microsoft.

In Google We’d Like To Trust
To its credit, Google realised the importance of trust early on. And it’s something CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt mentions on a regular basis at events and during Q&A sessions. Along with the ‘don’t be evil’ moniker it proudly displays as it’s informal motto, Google seems to have worked hard to maintain user trust.

When you look under the hood, you soon realise that Google’s ethical and ‘be good’ stance is more than skin deep. But as with any profit-making organisation, there are times when the economic motive conflicts with the desire to do right by the user and society.

Take the controversy over its email product, Gmail. A product that automatically reads the content of user messages to display relevant advertising. Privacy groups had a field day when it launched. Google’s attempts at reassurance were not well received (it emphasised that computers, and not humans, read the emails). The Gmail product lives on and it’s interesting how its popularity is undiminished by the privacy issue: it’s almost as if users are prepared to trade some privacy for utility.

Increasing Footprint
The reality is that Google’s online presence and influence shows no sign of abating. When Mazumdar talks about people stepping onto Google property, many still largely think of Google the search engine. But Google’s portfolio of services has grown rapidly and it’s becoming very difficult to avoid the plethora of highly regarded and largely free services, many the result of acquisitions over the last 12-18 months.

Services such as the number one video platform YouTube; the number one feed syndication platform, Feedburner; Microsoft Office competitor Google Docs (online word processing, spreadsheet, presentation) – all totally free. And the biggest acquisition to date, display advertising provider DoubleClick, is currently awaiting regulatory approval as a result of Google’s perceived dominance of the online advertising market.

And then there’s Google foray into arguably the biggest online phenomenon of the time, social networks. But Google’s Orkut is not perceived as big a success as its other products since it’s only really popular in Brazil. And it’s recent attempt to tie up with the wunderkind Facebook was snubbed.

RIP, the teenager.

That’s because, according to Higham, the teenager with their unique traits may have died: “The grey consumer, the older consumer, is behaving like we traditionally think of as the teenager, to some extent. And teenagers are starting to behave like the grey consumer.”

And the consequence of this increasing fusion and confusion, Higham believes, is that age will become increasingly irrelevant to marketers.

The Evidence
Politics, ideology and general attitudes to life are some areas that Higham believes best illustrate this stereotype reversal: “Teens are becoming more sensible and serious, and conservative and traditional. Whereas the older consumers are still quite hedonistic and into rock ‘n roll.

“If you look at it from a generational point of view, you’ve got baby boomers, and to some extent generation X, who’ve grown up with the idea that there is a right and wrong, the idea of idealism, the idea that you either support the left or the right, that there’s something that drives you emotionally or spiritually or morally other than purely money.

“We have a generation that’s growing up who’ve never experienced any politics apart from the politics of spin…who’ve grown up without this idea of organised religion…we are starting to see these kids saying we want the traditional things, marriage, religion.”

That said, a penchant for retro fashion, tastes and ideology is hardly new. So is this cyclical or a long-term trend?

Lifestyle, Not Lifestage
Higham clearly views this as an evolutionary trend.

For one thing, he thinks that societal values are changing as affluence spreads and materialism becomes less influential in our lives: “I don’t think the younger generation has that kind of ‘keeping up with the Jones’ thing as much…that’s almost being forced upon them [by the older generation]…Teenagers don’t really care about products so much, e.g. getting an iPod, it’s what you do with the them.”

This apparent quest for meaning and true fulfilment, rather than superficial consumerism, seems to parallel the proliferation of brands aiming to bring meaning into peoples’ lives (e.g Dove). Thereby suggesting that people increasingly long for ‘interesting’ over ‘ostentatious’.

And just as Hollywood taps old TV series when original movie ideas are thin on the ground, Higham believes that people are apt to do a similar thing in the search for interesting ideas and pastimes. But rather than do this because it may be fashionable to go retro, he believes the motive is a genuine quest for inspiration: “The boomer generation were the first one to really kick away the idea that you should respect your elders, because they grew up in a generation whereby you should respect young people was the mantra…the ‘millennials’ is the generation that really will respect elders more. It’s one of the more conservative, traditional traits…they’re getting interested in older ways of doing things, making things in wood and knitting!”

In short, people have more ‘freedom’ to do what they want to do, be who they want to be, beyond the constraints of age or other categorisations: “There is a kind of ‘tribe lite’. That you can be a punk one day, a chav the next, into hip hop the next and into grime (music) the next. It’s almost like trying on different fashions but it’s not the [standard] sort of tribal thing.”

The internet has arguably played a significant role in hastening this trend. The pace and nature of innovation has inspired more personalisation, resulting in people increasingly seeing themselves as an individuals rather than a consumer type. And the significant use of the internet now for social networking, and ability to quickly find groups or niche media/content of common interest (e.g. blogs, video, podcasts), ultimately enables them to cater to their specific tastes irrespective of age, location, or background.

Where Next?
The implications for Higham’s observations are naturally significant.

Strategically, he believes that marketers need to rethink their preconceptions of different age groups: “[The political parties] are saying the way to engage young people is to do lots of very media friendly things or do lots of things on the internet, because all that issue stuff, all that ideology stuff doesn’t work. Rubbish! The way to engage young people is to talk ideology.”