How to target Gen Y

Dion Appel runs Lifelounge, a youth marketing agency currently turning over about $7 million.

“I think the biggest mistake is lack of knowledge on how best to connect with this market. It is very competitive out there in the advertising industry and in saying that there are a lot of companies that believe that they have the right tools to access this particular audience.”

“The biggest segment is mainstream, representing 50% of the young adult lifestyle market but the most influential segments are the style surfers and brand winners. And the most commercial are the brand winners and the brand followers.”

“We’re talking 16 to 30 by demographic, but we also measure the psychographic as well because we recognised over the last seven years of doing all of this research that it’s more of a mindset and a behaviour than it is an age.”

“So we ask a number of questions about self perception. So how you perceive yourself and how you want others to perceive you to help you establish your identity and enable you to express yourself. And those questions of perception enable us to understand whether somebody that is 34, 35, 36 or 14 or 15 years of age still fits within the mindset of 16 to 30 year olds.”

“There are a lot of companies that will just go out and just go “it’s on television, it’s on outdoor, it’s on radio, it’s on the internet because we need to be on the internet because all the young adults are on the internet”.

“What they’re sort of missing is the ability to plan accordingly so that you sort of put it into their environment first so that they’re the first to know and then let it amplify out into the broader mainstream mediums, which are still very important and still very powerful and very much part of the mix.”

Read more about Dion Appel and Lifelounge.