Designing Experiences For Gen Y December 5, 2007
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Gen Y, Marketing to Gen Y, Online strategy, Social computing.2 comments
We just published a research report that I’ve alluded to in earlier posts called “The Gen Y Design Guide.” The research examines how Gen Y (ages 18 to 27) are different from older consumers and defines a set of implications for designing experiences. Here’s the executive summary from the research…
Gen Y consumers are a unique breed. But what exactly makes them different from their elders? Our research unearthed nine attributes of Gen Yers’ social, emotional, and mental makeup that shape their perception of interactions. To reach these young consumers, we’ve identified four design approaches: immediacy, Gen Y literacy, individualism, and social interactivity. To truly engage Gen Y, firms should create a Gen Y advisory board and apply Gen Y design approaches across touchpoints.
To get a sense of the world of Gen Yers, just take a look at the lyrics from a top-rated song “Crank That” from Soulja Boy:
What?!?! I have no idea what that means, but I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to know.
Our research uncovered the following key attributes of Gen Yers:
- Socially Fluid And Highly Networked. Having gone through high school, college, or a first job, many Generation Yers are breaking away from their families and forging their own paths and networks. We found three characteristics that define Gen Yers socially. They are continually connected, speak their own language, and are influenced by peers.
- Emotionally Searching For Their Identities. Adolescents and early adults are at a period of self-discovery, shaped by their environment, education and activities, and social culture. That’s why they seek recognition and fame, enjoy absurdity - and humor with an odd slant, and embrace a variety of subcultures.
- Mentally Fickle And Creative. Few Generation Yers can remember a time when technology - from DVDs to PCs - did not play an important part in their lives. Having grown up with deep exposure to media and devices, they skim text and information quickly, are easily bored, and are expressive and creative.
Based on the unique characteristics of Gen Y, we defined four design approaches for appealing to them:
- Design approach No. 1: immediacy. To overcome Generation Y’s fickle attention and broad use of media, firms need to hook Gen Yers in by quickly exposing value and then keeping them interested over time.
- Design approach No. 2: Gen Y literacy. Because Gen Yers are so influenced by peers and their own communication style, firms need to speak to them authentically and on their level.
- Design approach No. 3: individualism. Diverse and expressive, Generation Yers respond to experiences that allow them to personalize and customize their interactions.
- Design approach No. 4: social interactivity. Since Gen Y consumers are very social, firms should consider enabling them to communicate and express themselves.
The bottom line: If you want to attract and engage Gen Yers, stop treating them like Boomers.
A View Of Forrester’s Consumer Forum October 11, 2007
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Gen Y, Marketing to Gen Y, Social computing.Tags: fcf07
3 comments
Today was a great day in Chicago — at Forrester’s Consumer Forum. The place was hopping! I had a number of very interesting meetings with people. It’s always great to catch up with clients and friends and meet new people at this event.
I’m not going to try and recap the entire day. You can get that level of detail from the many bloggers covering the event — maybe starting with Forrester’s marketing blog. But here are some of my personal observations…
- Christie Hefner called me a god. During Christie’s Q&A after her presentation, I was asking questions submitted by the audience from a microphone in the back of the ballroom. When I asked the first question, Christie said that it sounded like god. Okay, I sensationalized the point — but it was still a funny moment. Just call me “Bruce Almighty.”
- Charlene Li started a groundswell. Charlene delivered an outstanding opening keynote called “Your Customers Are Revolting ;-)” The main framework of her presentation was the “Ladder Of Participation” which defined 6 levels of Social Computing involvement: Inactives, Spectators, Joiners, Collectors, Critics, and Creators. She also talked about the P.O.S.T. process (People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology). While all of that content was great, the most memorable moment for me was the story about the TV show Jericho. CBS canceled the show after it received poor ratings when placed opposite American Idol. Some radio guy mobilized the show’s fans and CBS ended up bringing back the show after these fans sent tons of peanuts to CBS Entertainment’s president.
- Richard Edelman is not sorry. Richard Edelman had an interesting discussion called “Be It, Don’t Buy It.” What struck me the most was his response to questions about the scandal about the somewhat inauthentic blog called Walmart Across America. Mr. Edelman showed no remorse and offered no apology. Should he have been sorry? I don’t know; you decide. But, interestingly, he opened his speech with the following quote from Tom Friedman’s column called “The Whole World Is Watching:”
In this transparent world, how you live your life and conduct your business matters more than ever… Companies that get their ‘hows’ wrong won’t be able to clean up their mess by taking a couple of reporters to lunch…But this also creates opportunities…’how’ you keep your promises…build trust…collaborate…lead
- Mobile puts the social back into Social Computing. That was the theme of Vidya Lakshmipathy’s presentation. She opened up her session with a great presentation about the role that mobile does/can/will play in social networks — starting with a personal story about using Dodgeball. She identified a number of different types of mobile social technologies: social networks, social mapping, media sharing, micro Blogs, and tagging. The majority of her session was dedicated to discussion with the twenty-something founders of two firms: Michael Sharon
Nicholas Tommarellofrom Socialight and Nicholas TommarelloMichael Sharonfrom Urban Interactive. Socialight allows users to post “sticky notes” with in their current location — to comment on things like the food, the activities, or the great mural they see on a wall. Other people can search and find the sticky notes that are in their current location. Pretty cool stuff. Urban Interactive uses cell phones to create and carry out adult adventures. Michael used this tag line to describe what they do: “Transform cities into playgrounds.” One key lesson from the two of them: SIMPLICITY is the key to mobile design. - Gen Y are different; design accordingly. That was the theme of my presentation with Ross Popoff-Walker. I thought it was a fun (and hopefully informative) presentation. You can see a handful of my favorite slides at the bottom of this post. Here’s how our presentation flowed:
- After having some fun with the audience by looking at things have changed over the last 40 years, we talked about “a new creature” called Gen Yers.
- We showed a bunch of data to highlight how these youngsters are different. Compared to the overall US consumers, Gen Yers: Play video games 2.2x, Use cell phones 1.7x, Like to show off their taste and style 2.2x, Are influenced by what;s how and what’s not 1.9x, Store/listen to MP3s 1.8x, Watch DVDs on a PC 1.7x, Use IM 1.8x, Use social networking sites 2.7x, and Send/receive text messages 1.8x.
- This data helped us identify 10 attributes that companies need to keep in mind when designing experiences for Gen Yers. I had the most fun talking about how “Gen Y Speak Their Own Language.” To make that point, I showcased the lyrics from the #1 song on Billboard’s list: Crank That by Soulja Boy.
- Keeping in mind all of those attributes, we identified 4 strategies for designing online experiences for Gen Y: Immediacy, Gen Y Literacy, Individualism, and Social Interactivity.
- Our presentation was chock-filled with fun examples. We’ll be publishing this research later this quarter.
That’s all for now. I’m heading home very early tomorrow morning, so I won’t have any more updates from the Consumer Forum.
The bottom line: It’s a great event; don’t miss it next year!
fcf07Web 2.0 (a.k.a. Web And Weberer) September 30, 2007
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Online strategy, Social computing.add a comment
This wouldn’t be a real blog without at least one entry about Web 2.0. I’ve actually touched on the related topic in a previous post called The Death Of Web Pages? Great! – but that wasn’t enough to be a real “Web 2.0″ post. So here goes another blog post on Web 2.0…
To begin with, I hope you get my allusion to the movie sequel Dumb and Dumberer, which I really liked (despite its horrible reviews). It’s not that I think Web 2.0 is dumb (or dumberer), but I do think that they’re both packed with a whole bunch of silliness.
Let me start by saying that there are a number of very interesting things happening that are classified as Web 2.0. Social networking sites (like MySpace and Facebook); consumer-generated communications (blogs and product reviews); rich Internet applications (with technologies like Ajax and Flex); and aggregation technologies like RSS. All together, these things are definitely adding new ways for people (especially younger consumers) to interact online.
I’ve even heard the terminology being used around CRM — hence the new moniker “CRM 2.0.” But this is where I need to draw the line. Yes, Web 2.0 has some interesting opportunities for many businesses. But for most firms, it’s not nearly the most important thing they need to think about when it comes to their customers. Frankly, Web 2.0 hasn’t changed how you need to think about customer interactions. The fundamentals of customer experience remain the same: know more about what your customers need and figure out ways to better satisfy those needs. This is all about shifting your thinking from inside-out to outside-in.
But this isn’t new. As a matter of fact, it’s the same advice that we’ve been giving Forrester clients since the late 1990’s. Here’s a figure from a report in 2000 called Scenario Design.
In this report, we framed three key questions:
- Who are your target users?
- What are their goals?
- How can you help them accomplish those goals?
It turns out that we still push organizations to ask and answer those same three questions. I published an update to that report in 2004 called “Scenario Design: A Disciplined Approach To Customer Experience.” The report provides an updated argument for relying on those same three questions. And, yes, I am considering publishing another update to that report — which will absolutely reinforce the importance of those same three questions.
So, here’s how I put Web 2.0 in context:
After you figure out who your target customers are and gain an understanding of their needs, and then uncover their true goals in working with you, then you can apply Web 2.0 capabilities (along with all other capabilities) to help satisfy their needs.
The bottom line: Web 2.0 (and all of it’s “XYZ 2.0″companions) may enable companies to better serve customers — but only if they better understand them first.
My Takes On YouTube September 9, 2007
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Experience-Based Differentiation, Financial services, Online strategy, Social computing.2 comments
A short post today — based on a couple of my recent interactions with/on YouTube.
We just published a research report, Uploading To Video Portals Isn’t Easy, that looked at the usability of five video portals (thanks to Ross Popoff-Walker who did most of the work). It turns out that YouTube’s usability was pretty good. Here’s a summary of the report:
Forrester applied an abridged version of its Web Site Review methodology to the site experiences at five major video portal sites: YouTube, Yahoo! Video, Metacafe, Dailymotion, and Veoh. Our evaluation looked at how well each site supports young adults trying to upload a new video clip. Only YouTube received a passing overall score. Some of the major problems we found across the sites: poor contextual help and deficient privacy information.
I also just found out that someone posted an excerpt of my speech from Forrester’s Finance Forum on YouTube. It was probably done by Forrester’s marketing department; hoping that the video would generate the same buzz on YouTube as coke + menthos or the dancing cadet. 
Well, I can assure you that my video is not nearly as exciting as the running Russian video. But if you want to see a portion of my keynote speech on Experience-Based Differentiation, then here it is.
Unfortunately, you only see me — and can’t see any of the slides. Maybe someone in the audience who was illegally taping the event will post a video that shows the slides as well. You never know.
The bottom line: YouTube makes it easy to upload anything.
