Marketing to the Experience Generation

Mobile should be a key strategy for any brand hoping to reach the "Experience Generation" in India.A lot of the rules that marketers have trusted for years are slowly changing as the "Experience Generation" redefines how and when marketing can succeed. This Experience Generation is changing the consumer landscape in a number of ways:

• Living Life Uninhibited: A new generation, brimming with confidence and comfortable in their own skin.

• Focus on the Now: There is only the present. The past is old baggage and the future is just a promise, so maximize the now. If you keep maximizing the now, you work more, seek more, expect more, and are rewarded with more. 

• Mobile First: Mobile is the primary and preferred way to be online, and where media and information is consumed, quite often in short bursts. 

• Things Expire: Relationships, jobs, and fashion all expire. The few things that can keep up in a world of heightened expectations get to stick around.

• Youth: For these digital natives, mobile devices aren’t changing the way people communicate. It is how people have always communicated. 

• Urban: With people moving to cities for the promise of higher paying jobs, the confluence of people, culture, and energy is creating new ways to engage and interact that benefit from more disposable income and a premium put on value. 

The Experience Generation is already having an impact in India and, although the old forms of marketing and communication are still effective for now, the data is clearly showing that the quicker we address these new challenges, the better we will serve the wants and aspirations of a new generation ready to cut ties with tradition.

Experience Matters

Marketers need to meet the Experience Generation head on. Targeted television advertising may not reach them, so you have to diversify your marketing efforts. 

Campaigns need to have individual appeal tailored specifically to seamlessly and contextually engage with the Experience Generation on their mobile device. 

"One size fits all" doesn’t work anymore. 

You also need to be sure to deliver an amazing experience from the start and that means finding the right environment in which to advertise. Elegant, immersive mobile experiences reflect directly onto your brand. Crashing apps with buffering video tells the customer how well your company understands the mobile audience. 

You also have a change to focus your company in new ways, similar to Dove celebrating natural beauty, or Coca-Cola making an emotional case for the good moods its products convey. They are selling bigger ideas than soap and soda. 

The Experience Generation rewards innovation, encourages engagement with companies when it is handled properly, and gives you a chance to put your brand directly at its fingertips. Not only that, but given how much sharing is happening on mobile, you have an opportunity here to create an army of loyal consumers who are passing along your message for you. 

Whether they respond to your brand depends on how well you learn who they are and what experience speaks to them.

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