By Lisa Richardson
They’re young, hip and, well, complicated. Generation Y, according to demographers who like to categorise the world into easily definable chunks, are those consumptively fickle and technically savvy members of Western Civilisation between 14 ansd 28 years of age. Their purchasing power is growing, but it pales right now to the more financially endowed groups like the Gen-Xers and baby boomers. And while the internet-influenced, non-traditional paradigm in which they live is often ignored by large corporations, make no mistake, Gen Y is the future, and their trendsetting influences have the marketing eyes of more industries every quarter. Ignore them at your peril.
Currently ski resorts are wrestling with how to reach this demographic and keep snowsports growing, given that by 2011, they fall smack-bang within the industry’s primary target market of 17 to 36 year olds. It isn’t a lot of time. And those in the know reckon the snowsports world has a long way to go.
In Whistler last April, under the banner of the biggest youth festival in the snowsports calendar, the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival hosted PowWow08, inviting a host of senior marketing VPs from leading resorts across North America and key brands like Roxy, Burton, Salomon, TNA and Orage, to discuss how to adapt when the future is now.
Event host and moderator, Danielle Kristmanson, works with many of the snowsports industry’s leading brands as the Creative Director for Origin Design and Communications. The creative agency has offices in Whistler and Montreal and a client list that includes Whistler Blackcomb, Nikita, Liquid Boardwear, Billabong Colorado, Showcase Snowboards, the Canadian Ski Council and Salomon Canada.
From where Kristmanson is standing, the mind shift required to reach Gen Y, for a number of reasons, has just not been made. “Honestly, I haven’t had a whole lot of experiences that make me think the snowsports industry is doing what it needs to in this regard,” she says.
The mind shift requires an understanding of the Millennial brain. Gen Y’s sense of history is about three years deep. They think email is snail’s pace technology, the motherboard is their community, a text-message conversation between friends sitting beside each other is more private than a spoken one, and that Skype-love is a perfectly acceptable substitute for a real-time relationship.
For these digital natives, there was no life before the internet. The cry of the this generation is not “I want my MTV” but I’ll take my iPod, my digital camera, my Facebook friends list and I’ll DIY my own world.
How a company markets to a demographic that thrives in this fast-paced, ever-changing technological fray is an ongoing uncertainty in the business world.
Kristmanson notes that not only is the media dexterity of the Millennial generation completely unique, they’re also an increasingly urban, sedentary and even obese cohort, making the snowsports connection even more tenuous.
“I’m uninspired by what’s out there right now, but more, I’m perplexed about how we’ll take it from here. We’ve been recommending that our clients stop putting aside a budget line item for new media, but instead put aside human resources, because Web 2.0 requires them to be a community member. That’s the mindshift that just isn’t happening.”
Web 2.0 is what the “internet superhighway” morphed into – a borderless space in which computer users are interfacing with more than their PC, their avatar or their own alter ego but entering into online communities, sharing information and collaborating with other users in a virtual commons.
To reach the online habitat where most of Generation Y congregates, snowsports need to get away from their push-marketing mentality and enter a space where there is no hierarchy, the tribe reigns anda willingness to have dialogue on equal footing is expected.
And there’s the rub. Explains Kristmanson: “If you’re going to go online to talk to Generation Y, it has to be authentic. So basically, you’re pulling the youngest and least experienced guy in your company up to be the official spokesperson. That’s a big shift from just buying your way into people’s lives.”
Anthony Bonello, sales and marketing manager from Biglines.com echoes this. “The mountain ski industry is still a long way behind the eight-ball. They’re going wrong because they treat web like print. They submit their creative and then walk away.”
The Biglines.com community is a portal for the backcountry freeride crowd that started with a “geek wanted” flyer posted on a University of Calgary noticeboard in March 2000. In the space of eight years, it has flourished into the voice of ski-bum culture, with 150,000 unique users annually. There aren’t many ski magazines with that readership.
Bonello warns this means the job description of marketing managers is changing. “The internet is dynamic. Campaigns can and should be updated constantly and incorporate other tools, such as video and blogs and responses to consumers’ questions or complaints in forums,” he advises.
Authenticity of content and a willingness to engage one-on-one, or tribe-to-tribe, is the key to selling Generation Y. Kristmanson’s research has noted that Millennials raised in the advertising age have a very sophisticated understanding of marketing and its methods, but they’re not necessarily resistant to it. “Generation Y is who they are in large part because of technology,” she notes. “They have immediate access to information and that has made them who they are. They’ve used their media tools to redefine how a brand communicates with them. They are demanding two-way communication with a brand, and want to be marketed with, rather than to – in their voice, their terms and on their timeline.”
So while other industries are leading the charge, snowsports – particularly the resort side of snowsports – haven’t quite grasped this shift to Web 2.0. In part, it’s because the babyboomers are such ripe and low-hanging fruit.
There’s also a question of technology lag. Digital immigrants, those whose umbilical cord was not attached to a computer at birth, aren’t usually familiar enough with the language of Web 2.0 to adapt and speak fluently with their new target market. This makes it next to impossible to develop targeted and integrated outreach campaigns.
“Word of mouth, keywords, SEO, blog strategies, social networking…The people who are running things can’t wrap their heads around the vernacular, and when they do, it’s so new to them that they can’t think about it in an integrated way,” explains Kristmanson.
The snowsports industry is also afraid of losing control, which they’re losing anyway.
They just don’t realize it. “The brands we work with aren’t working the two-way street fast enough and it’s this fear of being trashed publicly that paralyses them,” observes Kristmanson. “They’d rather not go there, than expose themselves. The thing is, the kids are just going to be having those conversations anyway; it will just be in a forum that the brand’s not invited to.” Ironically, the snowsports and mountain culture players who are doing the best job at connecting with Generation Y are the ones who can’t afford a traditional marketing campaign. An old school weakness has become their secret superpower.
Take Voleurz. A British Columbia clothing brand, Voleurz is a five year collaboration of university friends who screenprinted six T-shirts to distribute at a party in 2003, and by winter 2008-09, had a product line of men’s and women’s tees, hoodies, sweaters and headwear, in 16 styles, 32 colours and available in 20 stores nationwide.
In October 2008, the Voleurz crew hit the road with a 17-stop film premiere tour of Outdoor Education, a feature that was downloadable for free as soon as the last screening was wrapped. Promotion for the screenings was done almost exclusively online, and print collateral, like posters, was regarded as an outdated form of marketing. “Who wants to walk around in the cold putting up posters when you can spend a couple of extra hours on the internet and have more people come out to a premiere?” asks Darren Rayner, the film’s director and cinematographer who also handles marketing and video production for Voleurz.
Outdoor Education is the fourth film from the crew, and by now they’ve figured out that it’s pretty near impossible to make a financial profit from the sale of DVDs. “What with the cost of the DVDs themselves, distribution and shipping, we figured why not release it on the internet for free,” explains Rayner. “Hopefully, we’ll get 100,000 downloads, maybe even double, and then we can go to our sponsors and say ‘Look at how many people have viewed it, look at the size of our reach.’” Not to mention, gain serious traction and promotion for their clothing brand.
A canny marketing ploy from a coterie of MBAs?
It’s more about the organic evolution of 23 year olds doing what turns their crank: running business meetings online through Skype, and sending business correspondence via Facebook or iCal. All it takes is a Mac, a $30 set of headphones, and a network of friends and supporters.
“We started doing clothing and filming in University, just for fun, to keep ourselves busy,” recalls Rayner who studied psychology, but spent much more time making and editing videos than he did reading psych texts. “What it’s become is a clothing brand with films that promote the clothing, the athletes and the community around us. We consider ourselves a lifestyle brand with a focus on skiing and snowboarding.”
The guys at Voleurz are actually living the lifestyle they’re pimping. They’ve built a steady buzz about their product and have retailers approaching them to put a guerilla indie brand – with no marketing budget – into their stores. “People are sick of the big corporations and the big marketing scams,” says Rayner. “If a kid wants a hoodie, it’s not just an impulse-buy anymore. There’s a more conscious decision-making process. He wants to support someone who likes to ski, snowboard, film, [someone who] is out there in the actual community he wants to connect with. I think a lot of people look at us and see a new, fresh and youthful brand. Which is exactly what we are.” It is an image that matches the reality.
In Generation Y’s new world order, there are no editors. No music producers. No CEOs who make or break your ideas. No arbitrary authority figure saying, yes, we will publish this, yes, we’ll play your record, yes, we’ll screen your film, yes, this can be part of the official canon. Instead, the content is dropped on-line and the tribe decides. Everything rises and falls based on the strength of its network. Including the cool factor of snowsports.
[...] And there’s the rub. Explains Kristmanson: “If you’re going to go online to talk to Generation Y, it has to be authentic. So basically, you’re pulling the youngest and least experienced guy in your company up to be the official spokesperson. That’s a big shift from just buying your way into people’s lives.” more… [...]