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If your kids are home on summer break, chances are you’re getting extra exposure to their secret language and mysterious electronic gizmos. They seem to have a culture all their own, and if you’ve ever wondered, “What are they really thinking?” you’re not alone.
Marketer and consultant Morris Reid, 35, spends a lot of time, like teenagers themselves, using his Blackberry, iPod, and cell phone—tools that keep him steeped in kid culture. In a nutshell, he has found that kids are more intelligent than parents give them credit for and are loyal to the products that are true to them.
Reid, a former staff aide in the Clinton administration, says that marketers should be listening to kids—not talking down to them—because they’re a key consumer demographic. Advertising directed at ’tweens and teens is estimated at more than $15 billion annually, at least double what it was 20 years ago.
Reid is a founding partner of Westin Rinehart, a public-affairs firm based in Washington, DC, that provides strategic communications and marketing to Fortune 500 and entrepreneurial companies, celebrities, and public-sector organizations. He is particularly interested in what youngsters think and feel—and his company finds out from 3,000 kids organized in a peer network.
One program close to Reid’s heart is Westin Rinehart’s Kids Seeding Program for schools, which works to make science and math cool. This fall, the seeding program will promote financial literacy for school-age kids.
Hemispheres sat down with Reid in a rooftop cabana at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, where he relaxed in a Geico caveman T-shirt with his gizmos spread out in front of him. With his finger on the pulse of what makes a product hot, we talked about what connects for teens, why social marketing is valuable, and why Bono is a marketing genius.
Q: What are some of the challenges of marketing to teens, of cracking the “code”?
A: Our goal is to make brands resonate and become relevant to tomorrow’s generation. There are once-iconic brands today that are dead. The Olympics, which used to inspire so much patriotism, is a dead brand to kids. Kids don’t care about it.
My problem is with 40- to 50-year-old marketers who think they understand what ’tweens and teens are feeling. You have to go right to the source. Our peer-to-peer network of youth consultants does that, asking, “How can we make this product or service better for you?” They supply the feedback—they’re actually living it.
Why did hip-hop culture finally cross over into the mainstream? The reason it finally resonated is that an executive went home to the suburbs and saw his kids and their friends listening to hip-hop music, wearing their hats backward, wearing baggy clothes. That’s when he realized something was going on, went back to his company, and did something. It’s about exposure and relating.
Q: What has your research revealed about kids?
A: Kids are smarter than you might suspect. They want an electronic product like a computer that they can customize and call their own. They’re also not as brand conscious as many have thought, and they prize quality over the brand. They don’t buy Nike just because it’s the thing to do. They buy quality. If they think that something is better, then they’ll move on. They are also true to things that are true to them, things with perceived value.
Q: How does your peer-to-peer network operate?
A: We have 3,000 kids in our “seeding” network whom we access by e-mail or text message. We have some champions [key people]. Whenever we need marketing information, we go to them with our questions. They then go to our database and get the response for us. It’s a proprietary network.
We’re unique because we spend a lot of time going to the kids, messaging them, talking and getting their input. Our youth-marketing division is bridging the gap between what the client believes it has to offer and what the market really wants. If you’re offering a car, why not go to youths and see what sort of design and features they want?
Q: Can you explain your Kids Seeding Program for schools?
A: We put a product in kids’ hands in a very unintrusive way. We’ll combine it with Science Day and work on the goal of making subjects like math and science cool. So we’ll invite a mayor and take a corporate engineer into a school and create a science project, such as a “puff-mobile.” The kids love it. We put them in teams in a friendly, competitive situation. We give them all the tools—glue, straws, paper for the sails, Life Savers for the wheels—to construct vehicles that are powered by the kids’ own breath. They’re really learning about engineering, math, and science. They get to race their mobiles and get a certificate naming them Engineer of the Day.
Q: How do you work the products in?
A: It’s about packaging things intelligently. We could seed anything we want. If we were taking our program to 16-year-olds who were just starting to drive, and we wanted to promote an insurance product—like this T-shirt I’m wearing, whose slogan is “So easy, even a caveman could do it”—that would put Geico in front of them in an unintrusive way. We really want to help educate them about something. The most important thing is that we get involved with companies that have products that are relevant for the kids.
Q: Can you tell us how your financial literacy program will work?
A: It will be a big push for us in the new school year, and we’ll be partnered with financial companies that have interesting, innovative ways of marketing and want to give back. People spend more time teaching kids how to dribble a basketball than how to keep a savings account. With our financial literacy program we’ll show kids how to be financially responsible, how to understand the value of money, and how to build credit. However, a lot of marketing today is based on hip-hop culture, which is really about excess and bling. Celebs spend $50,000 on a watch, so we’ve got to turn that on its head and make the concept of saving money the “in” thing. Hip-hop artists can help.
We need to get people involved whom teens admire. We might get a celebrity musician to save a certain amount of money, then set a parallel target for the kids, and if they make it they get free tickets to see the star in concert.
Q: What’s been the impact of technology on kids?
A: Using technology today is how kids are socialized. They live with their cell, their Blackberry, iPod, and TV on—it’s hard for people older than 50 to understand that a kid can have three different things going on and still process that information. Multitasking is a corporate word—kids call it living their life.
That’s why I believe that this upcoming generation is going to be a great generation. Tom Brokaw and others may’ve said that the parents of the baby boomers are the greatest generation, but I believe that this generation will be the greatest, because it’s one that will have to deal with issues like have and have-not nations in a multicultural world.
Q: Could you explain your company’s overall goal of providing sound advice to clients?
A: We put a premium on good advice for our clients across the board. I believe that no matter who you are—a brand manager, a CEO, an entrepreneur, or a public agency—you need solid advice and good counsel. Our philosophy is that we’re trying to do three things: (1) We protect brands under pressure; (2) we expand brands—if you’re No. 5 and want to become No. 2, we’ll develop a program that will help move you up; and (3) we create an acceleration strategy—if you’re a start-up and you want to act as if you’ve been around a long time, we’ll put a strategy into place that will help you advance.
You have to build brands that will last a long time or reinvigorate them. A lot of times, companies spend money on making an immediate buzz and they don’t develop any long-term value. I look at it the same way I look at a client—I want a client for a lifetime, not just for a season or a product launch. People have to look at that from a customer marketing strategy. What is going to distinguish my product; what’s going to make that customer return? It’s the philosophy I use to lead the company. þ We’ve exhibited a lot of out-of-the-box thinking, particularly when we’re doing projects around brand pressure.
Q: How do you make a product hot to young people?
A: Kids want something that’s authentic. They want “next,” the product that’s going to set them apart. Take Laura Bush—she went to a state dinner, and another woman had the same dress on. So she went upstairs to change. It’s the same thing with young people. They say social Darwinism begins on the playground. Kids want relevance and authenticity. That’s why they love video games—it’s an emotional connection for them.
The company that’s doing everything right is Apple. They have killer product—iPod and the upcoming iPhone—and it always begins with that. Then they’re smart about marketing. The product emotionally connects with people. They have hip ads. It just resonates.
Look, the smartest marketing person in the world right now is U2’s Bono because he took the ultimate unsexy issue of Africa [AIDS relief] and made it something that suburban kids want to be a part of. The guy is a genius, and he’s made giving back the coolest thing. It’s made an emotional connection with kids, and now they want to get involved. I mean, we’re talking about AIDS in Africa. Right now, charity and social marketing are in. Kids are connecting with it—and that’s a very good thing.
Ashley Jude Collie is an LA-based writer whose work has appeared in Playboy, Spin, Performance, and Maclean’s.
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