KEEP IT REAL Y ALL

Wednesday, 12 April 2006 07:35

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In our beloved Kenya, the term “youth” became both a misleading and one pregnant with negativity when it became synonymous with a certain bunch of forty year old men with multiple wives and children scattered all over like wild oats during the infamous Youth for KANU ’92 days. That was an era when the country managed the feat of creating thirty millionaires and thirty million paupers. Right now when the term “Y” word is mentioned, the unwelcome pong of senseless violence wafts by many Kenyan nostrils. It is against this background that for the purpose of this piece, I will take the term “youth” to represent recent college leavers as the oldest in that cluster – I’m hoping that nobody in their mid thirties is still in college unless it is for “further studies”. I will use the term “children” to refer to the pre-teens and early teens. You’ve probably come across generation X (those born after the baby boom in the 1960s and 1970s), generation Y (those born from the late 1970s to the early 1990s) and tweens (anyone who is pre-teen from 10 up); a nomenclature I have intentionally chosen to ignore for our local purposes. I apologize in advance as I shall proceed to keep switching between official and unofficial classifications.

When many of us are talking to babies we tend to clown and speak “baby language”, a language we don’t understand but hope our super-intelligent offspring somehow will. Some schools of thought are completely against this. Unfortunately, the hard disk above my neck is unable to quickly supply me with the name of the chief protagonist of this school of thought. She believes that even babies should be treated like “people” as this allows them to grow faster into “real people”. The same logic can be applied when speaking to the youth and children. This is a segment that believes it is grown up, or rather, believes “those adults” don’t appreciate that they are now grown up and are very defensive about their new found adulthood. Any signs of being talked down upon or preached to are taken negatively and the backlash for brands can mean their very death. We must acknowledge that the youth are a fickle yet attractive market as they offer longer life time value to brands.

When marketing to the youth, brands tend to be more successful when they relate their brand to current trends. Right now we have the “kapuka” thing going in local music and the generally more positive feel about the country despite concerted efforts by our own government to permanently and irreversible change our sentiments. The Capital FM brand for example, is dedicating significant air time to the “proudly Kenyan dot come” agenda by playing local music despite the brand being heavily rock oriented – or at least it used to be. That is a subject for another discussion though.

Let us look at a few local examples of brands that relate to children and the youth and examine how they have fared. Now that KTN has been in the news so much of late, we’ll begin with the station’s Club Kiboko. Club Kiboko has worked over the years because, unlike many television programmes meant for children, it was went beyond a television programme and became a real experience for the real owners of the brand, the children. The show had the fortune of always being hosted by the right people. Jimmi Gathu, Lorna Irungu, Yvonne Maingey, among others all did a great job and even came dangerously close to owning the Club Kiboko brand at different times.

They always talked to the children and not at them, and not in a childish, condescending or preachy adult manner, making Club Kiboko one of the most enduring brands on KTN. I’ve always believed that no presenter, whether on television or radio should be bigger than the media brand or even the show they host for that matter. Yes, even Oprah and Larry King Live! What happens after their demise? Isn’t that giving the brand a rather short lifespan? Teens, like children and the youth are increasingly intelligent and quite sceptical towards traditional forms of communication. They think they are adults and wish to be addressed thus. This is something many brands forget and end up talking down or preaching to their young consumers.

Blue Band Choco was an interesting line extension (is it really still around?). I don’t think it worked. Here’s the short version of the long story. When many of us were growing up, while we loved good old Blue Band (and really had no choice), it was sometimes, well, boring. Being the adventurous children that we were, it wasn’t lost on us that quite often, next to the jar of Blue Band, a tin of cocoa sometimes took its pride of place to augment the ubiquitous tea (coffee was for grown ups). Also next to the Blue Band was a jar of sugar. We were quick to learn that mixing Blue Band with the sugar and cocoa created a great new bread spread and were happy to try this as often as we could.

One thing was very important in this ritual though; it had to be done while the adults were away as they would never approve and even if they did, it would kill the whole adventure. Unfortunately, some adults at Unilever probably stumbled on this idea and went ahead to prepare the concoction on a large scale in the factory so as to, I would imagine, save the children all the trouble. Little did they know that the whole idea of that concoction and the ritual surrounding it was the sheer adventure of flirting with trouble and getting away with it.

Who told those Unilever adults that the children needed help or were having trouble mixing cocoa and sugar into Blue Band? Eventually, the brand failed because adults didn’t get the essence of what the children were trying to do. They came up with a solution when there was not problem at all and the children did the logical thing of rejecting what “those adults” thought was a great idea. The children felt cheated by the Blue Band brand and now Prestige is giving the only margarine some of us knew as we were growing up, a run for its money. The moral of this story is, “adults cannot be trusted to competently do the messing around on behalf of children!”

On the other hand, a success story in the “messing around on behalf of children” was concocted by Heinz who came up with EZ Squirt ketchup range. The coloured ketchup brands introduced by Heinz were a huge hit because they read, through market research, what the children really wanted in the brand. The children wanted “more fun!” and the Heinz brand simply helped them along. Children already liked playing with ketchup so Heinz introduced and marketed the playful qualities of the new EZ Squirt range such as a special squirt friendly nozzle and fancy colours. This brand idea turned out to be a huge success! Unlike Blue Band Choco, the Heinz EZ Squirt brand didn’t try to interfere by doing for the children what they were happy to do for themselves – mess about and have fun!

Teens are an enormously important market segment because they are disproportionately powerful in terms of being trend setters and early adopters. Teens can make or break a brand as they move in the droves. If your brand is in it’s in and if it’s out it’s definitely out. If a brand can capture teens and establish brand loyalty, it can mean decades of success for the brand. That is why I find Trust Condoms from PSI (population services international) an interesting case study. The Trust brand got its value proposition and brand positioning all wrong from day one. I’m told PSI is a not for profit organization and its goals are slightly more noble than getting the bank balance to look impressive for the shareholders. it wouldn’t however spark off the third world war if the brand had a better strategy so that it could make a little more cash to pursue those noble objectives the organization aspires to.

In this era of "mtumba" and knock offs for virtually everything including lifestyle and class, where everyone, especially the youth are extra sensitive about their image, it is extremely hard to inject aspirational brand qualities and class into a product that is sold at three bob regardless of how big your marketing budget is and how many awards your advertising agency has won. Such is the challenge faced by the Trust brand. Just to demonstrate how incongruous its brand strategy is, the TRUST brand had the nerve to line extend to studded condoms in a further affectation of “class”. It also simultaneously had huge TRUST branded walls in lower class areas while placing EABL-length television spots in upper class television stations at prime time. I’m not too sure that anybody was convinced of the TRUST brand’s style and class but I’m sure many a parent was chagrined by the sexy prime time television spots.

Mary Brown, the president of Imago Creative, writing about future trends changing marketing discusses how cynicism about marketing is at an all-time high, forcing brands to cultivate authenticity on a level never demanded before. This is even truer when relating to brands that have “young people” as their target market. For your brand to thrive in the young market, you have no choice but to “keep it real y’all”,

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First published in SOKONI magazine