Youth Marketing: 4 Post Easter Breakup Tips

In Trends

The post Easter break-up is inevitable for some brands who have invested heavily in coining during this chocolate egg and bunny filled holiday. With the buzz brands could piggy back on, youth, their peers and families were indulging in all the Easter goodness these brands could offer. Unfortunately, most of them discover too late that they’ve put their eggs in one basket. Instead of being the heroic Easter Bunny, your brand is more of a humpty dumpty who had a great fall and has no idea how to get back up on that wall. Maybe your brand shouldn’t have leaned on Easter for support? Nevertheless, here are our 5 youth marketing tips to cure brands’ Easter break-up!

What comes first?

The chicken or the egg? We bet there are a lot of brands out there that are reactively cramming content plans with the hope to hang on to any youth market interest they gained during Easter. Their advertising and stories aligned to the holiday, the promotions were lit and students seemed to be having such a great time. So what are we in for, post Easter?

Aside from being a time of religious reflection and celebration, April is South Africans’ mid-year down time and the one space in the year when everyone gets to zone out, enjoy a short holiday and return to university or work, refreshed. What comes after, is a less exciting slump. It’s not because brands are unequipped without the fluffy public holidays and special occasions, but that they forgot that they are the chicken – not the egg.

The best next step, which should have happened long before, is to plan, plan and plan some more to ensure your brand is not caught catching up at any point of the year, again.

Hop Along

What youth love about Easter is the fact that brands are laying so many eggs ie. creating so many campaigns for them to get involved in. Brands that know who they are however, are more likely to retain this young client base, and have likely done the groundwork way before Easter. Knowing who they are points to marketing their brand and not focussing on hype alone.

Successful brands in the youth space are usually also consistently present in some form whether physical or through other interactions. They’re on campus, in the mix of students’ social life and most probably form part of the trusted products their parents are using, which has a large influence on the products they’ll use in future – Easter is a great time for observing this. From tradition to creating memories with certain brands, students will mimic their family, peers and those they look up to.

The lesson here is that brand success shouldn’t be built on holidays or occasions, but stories of where these brands come from and what they’ve come to do so the youth market can feel like they relate. Your brand should comfortably fit into occasions it chooses to partake in, or choose to keep their rabbit foot out of it.

Speckled Eggs?

Earning the youth’s trust takes way more than candy. They know when they’ve been dealt speckled eggs and are being swooned by a brand who simply wants to drive product sales. What really interests them however, are brands with values close to theirs, that offer them a solution, something that will make their life easier, or more enjoyable, before the word “sales” comes into the equation. In fact, the action of a sale will follow naturally.

One brand that had the right idea this Easter was First Choice’s popular dairy dessert product, Velvet. The brand created a #funfilledvelvet campaign encouraging people to purchase, experiment and share their Velvet creation.

The fact that the campaign was centered around its culinary potential and not particularly focussed on Easter, but timeously so, has ensured the product punt stays relevant and in line with the brand. Velvet combined the campaign with fun sampling activities in store where shoppers were given a mini donut hole to dip in their Velvet flavour of choice, add fun toppings and get consumers to taste the product. Starting off during a time filled with moments and sharing, ensured that the youth will most probably remember them when their cravings hit and cleverly the campaign will carry on into June – not counting on Easter for the win.

Turning Words Into Worth

The problem brands seem to be having is getting the youth to want to get to know them in the first place. This interaction can start long before an activation or encounter on the go. A good starting point would be to look at your brand advertising, storytelling and its ability to walk the talk. Easter is an easy time to make big promises in good faith and fail your audience later. We need not remind you of Pepsi and United Airlines’ recent bloopers? Okay, okay – see Pewdiepie’s take on things:

Now we can see how important it is for brands to do as they say to avoid disappointing Millennials. What about the role of storytelling and advertising?

This is generally the place and time to show who you are, how strongly you feel about it and what you do to prove it. Advertising has been marketers’ go-to tool in the past because it used to allow brands to tell and sell, but it’s now much more complicated. Copy usually represents facts, is written to sell, raise awareness and promote memorability so the youth will buy the product in question, once they’re in store. So copy must be the golden egg – because it sells?

Wrong. Content is just as important as it delivers everything needed in terms of emotive persuasion and connection, like reinforcing credibility, accuracy and authenticity – key identifiers the youth look for in brands when they scale down on who to support.

Is one better than the other? Definitely not. Brands need to get to know their youth audience better to know when to use content and copy interchangeably, or even together. Just the speed of advertisements alone can affect how you turn simple campaign copy into content. Burger King was a great recent example of how to use this mix effectively.

It’s Not Over

So you’re thinking of the next big thing and trying to recover from the inevitable drop in engagement you’re experiencing after the Easter Holiday, but it’s not all lost. The youth market is consuming, fast moving and they’ll make time for brands who don’t depend on bells and whistles to be great.

If you need some help with relaying who you are beyond the golden foil cover you’ve hidden behind over Easter, get in touch with Student Village on 011 885 3918 or email [email protected].