Young adults living at
home are "willing to spend [discretionary funds] on computers and big-screen
TVs, travel and sports cars, things that other generations would consider
frivolous," says David Morrison, whose firm, Twentysomething
Inc., probes adultolescents for
companies like Coca-Cola and Nokia.
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"The young-adult marketplace
is the ideal place to start with new technology, especially if it's low
cost," says David Morrison, president of
wentysomething
Inc., a Philadelphia, Pa.,
marketing-research firm that focuses on young people. "The companies can
start recovering some capital investments and get a better feeling about the
applications." The theory goes that once American kids have adopted the
technology, their parents will become more familiar with it, and eventually
more comfortable in using it. "Not only are you conditioning the youth
market, but through demonstration and explanation, the larger market as
well," Mr. Morrison says.
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Despite the sport's hip
appeal, youth-market experts warn that ESPN needs to tread lightly [with its
X Games campaign]. "They run the risk of the games being perceived as
overcommercialized," says David Morrison, president of
wentysomething
Inc., a Philadelphia
youth-marketing consultancy.
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"[Import tuners], like all
young adults, can smell a fake a mile away. This is an incredibly tight,
incredibly intelligent sub-culture, and a foreigner is going to be picked up
instantly,'' says David Morrison, president of
wentysomething
Inc., a Philadelphia
youth-marketing consultancy. ''To reach out and touch them where they live
and work requires a subtle presence and word-of-mouth at the street level.''
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The cola giant, like
Canton-based Reebok International Ltd., and other companies that use rap
stars in their ads, walk a fine line, said David Morrison, president of
wentysomething
Inc., a Philadelphia, Pa.,
marketing firm. "If you're going to try and be hip, you're going to alienate
people,'' he said. "It's a Catch-22. You've got to be relevant to the
market, yet the [spokes]people you're picking are likely to be the very ones
moms and dads don't want children listening to.''
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"The stage was really set in
the late `80s and early '90s recession, where people had to move home but
there was that stigma,'' said David Morrison, founder of
wentysomething
Inc., a Pennsylvania-based
consulting company that specializes in forecasting market trends of the 15-
to 34-year-old age group. "There's a different dynamic at play now, with
parents behind the move, where before they were not. The children behind the
move are proud of it and are not trying to hide it,'' Morrison said. "This
has transformed the way of viewing life after college." Morrison, the
founder of Twentysomething Inc., predicts that other key factors will also
be at play. For instance, he said the emergence of other cities where the
cost of living is not as astronomical as it is in Boston, San Francisco and
New York, may lure more young out on their own. He cites Miami as one
example of a more affordable city that is becoming "hot'' for 20-somethings.
Morrison also said the '90s mantra of making money has lost its luster for
the younger generation, perhaps freeing them to make moves that will be less
dependent on going for the gold - and needing to move home for a while to
accomplish that. "The traditional 'let's get a good job, big bucks and work
in a skyscraper' [mindset] is no longer as big an objective of [today's
emerging college grads], and after 9/11 it has even become less important,''
Morrison said. "It's going to be changing how people typically migrate after
they graduate college.'' Return to Press Room
"This is exactly the group of
college graduates companies want to be talking to," explains David Morrison,
president and founder of Twentysometing Inc., a Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania-based young adult consulting and research firm. "All the money
that is normally spent on survival suddenly transfers into discretionary
income and that translates into large screen TV sets, the latest consumer
electronics, and brand-new sports cars. If you think about what this market
aspires to buying, the people most able to afford [those items] are the
college students who move back home." [All of this] means marketers should
start paying more attention. Twentysomething's Morrison thinks that Gen Y's
pragmatic and goal-oriented attitude, combined with their income boost from
living at home, makes ignoring this group a mistake. "A lot of marketers'
own assumptions lead them to overlook this market because they still see a
stigma to moving back home." He adds, "This is a big trend and it's just
waiting to be capitalized on." Morrison suggests that given Gen Y's optimism
and long-term approach, marketers focus on their aspirational needs --
giving them products and services that enable them to get where they want to
go.
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Though occasionally locking
down into brand preferences, GenXers have taken to more of what David
Morrison, president of young adult research and marketing consultancy,
Twentysomething
Inc., calls "brand surfing".
Morrison defines GenX consumers less by what brands they click to and more
by what they're open to. It is a predisposition, he says, conditioned not
only be a dearth of sacred cows, but also by an entry into the alcohol
market's stage one -- beer -- in the years of wildfire proliferation of
sub-brands and microbrews. Trying new and different products by dint of what
new and different labels show up on the bar has become second nature to
them. "What is comes down to every time is, what kind of impact does it make
five feet away?" says Morrison, who has consulted for United Distillers,
Seagram, and Austin Nichols. "Is this thing, when you put it in a bar, with
neon lighting on it, going to jump out at you and scream, or not? Absolut
does. Bombay Sapphire does. Aftershock does, with its bottle frosted at the
top, then grading down to a starker red, to augment the cinnamon base of the
product inside. You see that and say, 'What is that? I gotta try it.' And
there's the fun. That's key here. It's social -- about fun, experimenting,
adventure. You've really got two kinds of people playing this game," says
Morrison. "You've got those that went the career route -- investment
banking, dot-commers still out there. They're working 80-hour weeks, and at
the end of that particular day, there's not a lot of time for carousing. So
when they get the time, all that discretionary spending gets condensed into
the relative few moments. They're going to order out and take home more, and
they're indulging themselves more." On the other side of the equation, this
generation saw the end of the 'Ozzie and Harriet, join-a-company-for-life,
move-up-the-ladder' career path, and with all of the downsizing of years
past, they checked out of the system, says Morrison. Thus, two different
people end up at the same bar and, at some point, the same brand... As
Morrison says, brand loyalty is hard to come by in this market, but AD has
at least put itself back into contention for all of us discerning slackers.
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"Just because
something works across the pond doesn't mean it'll be a hit in the U.S."
says David Morrison, author of Marketing to the $200 Billion Campus
Crowd and president of
Twentysomething
Inc., a young-adult consulting &
research firm in Philadelphia.
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"The stigma [of living at
home] is gone for the most part," says David Morrison, president of Twentysomething
Inc., a strategic planning and
marketing research firm in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. "Parents still feel
it, but graduates do not." Cars, clothing, travel and entertainment are
[especially] hot purchases among this segment, Morrison says. How to reach
them? Start early: "Start a dialogue with them while they're juniors and
seniors in college through e-mail and direct mail," Morrison advises.
"[Then] continue that dialogue once they've graduated." Tongue-in-cheek
advertising is a fabulous tool for making light of the back-at-home scenario
while attracting business. "You don't want to make them feel mocked, but
offer something that speaks to that tension," says Morrison. "But speak to
their aspirations as well, and say 'Let us help you get there.' "
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Because driving is way high
on teens' priority lists, look for retro-style cars like the PT Cruiser
Convertible and the Mini Cooper S to make a big splash. Hovering in the
$18,000 to $20,000 range, these cars are accessible coolness. "These
vehicles combine the trend of the desire for self-expression and the ability
to get a wonderful value at the same time," says David Morrison, founder of
Twentysomething
Inc., a youth marketing consulting
firm in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Transportation on smaller wheels will
continue to be hot, as skateboard parks flourish into 2002. "Many towns are
outlawing skateboarding and inline skating within the town itself," says
Morrison, "so towns are providing an outlet for skateboarding and fun by
building parks in [designated] areas."
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"In our in-house research
talking with young adults across the country, there has been an obvious
trend of more and more adults graduating from college and returning home,"
said David Morrison, president of a Pennsylvania-based consulting research
firm called Twentysomething
Inc. "The last time there was such
a flocking back to the nest was during the recessing of the early 1990s.
During those days, a stigma of humiliation or defeat accompanied the return
home. 'Your child moved back home? Mine's got a great job.' That sort of
thing," Morrison said. "Both the child and the parent didn't talk about it,
as if the parents had failed in their duty of getting the child out of the
roost once and for all." But that is not the case now. There's little
feeling of shame, no overwhelming feeling that in moving home they have
turned into losers, in part because so many of their peers are doing it.
Rather, these 20-somethings feel they are being prudent, that they are
charting a responsible course. "It's a very different ball game now,"
Morrison said. "It's being perceived as a choice. If you move back after
graduation and four, five, six years down the road you're still living with
your folks, that's probably not good for society," Twentysomething
Inc.'s Morrison said. "We want
mature people. At a certain point, mother bird and father bird have to give
the boot to their grad."
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(Switzerland - Translated from the French
Text)
"Free from most household
expenses because their parents take care of the essentials, adultolescents
have the means to invest in brand-name items, take luxury vacations, and
follow the latest consumer trends," explains David Morrison, director of
Twentysomething
Inc., a consulting agency. "The
advertising industry has not yet realized the strong economic potential of
this generation," insists David Morrison. "I can only encourage them to
target this growing subset, even if it means making tongue-in-check
references to their current situation as adults still living at home."
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A Publication of the National Automobile
Dealers Association
Car buyers in 2015
will be a mix, says David Morrison, president of market research firm Twentysomething
Inc., Philadelphia, Pa.
Baby-boomers will be starting to buy their last cars. Gen X-ers will be the
"prime target for luxury cars"—and everything else. Gen Y's will be among
first-time new-car buyers. And Gen Z's will be looking at entry-level
vehicles. Morrison sees "flexibility," with certain parts of a vehicle being
updated to meet motorist needs—from a two-seater one day to a minivan the
next. But what about pricing? And will two or three people be needed to lift
off body panels? If so, it's not going to happen, he says.
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But wanting to work in an enjoyable team environment isn't new. In the
dot-com heyday, the look of a work space took a left turn. Unconventional
amenities then – pool tables, video arcades, couches – are influencing
office space today. "It was kind of like a frat party crossed with corporate
America," Mr. Morrison says. For most Gen X'ers, he says, "it was their
first experience with a nontraditional work space." Although Mr. Morrison
doubts offices are on the way back to those days, he says companies will
have to start rethinking their work environments, if they haven't already.
"Look at young adults today – they are the bottom of the ladder. They are
feeling the greatest pain with the least benefits," he says. "And in that
sense, a way a company can start to increase employee satisfaction is to put
that little cappuccino machine out there."
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Room
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Trendspotters are recognizing a type of nouveau
nerd: They are proud of their intellectual prowess, and popular culture is
beginning to appreciate the brains-and-sensitivity power combination. Call
it the revenge of the nerds... cool nerds. "The geeks are having their
moment in the sun with technology being the name of the game in our
society," said David Morrison, with Twentysomething
Inc.,
a Pennsylvania-based young adult research firm. "Geekhood is going to be
cool for a very long time to come... [it] is now a gateway to immense
wealth, power, and fame that's beyond our wildest imagination."
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