Marketing to our generation:

for students in IEC 702, IEC902, MGTD06, MGS523, ECP1100 

Notes taken during a classroom discussion 30Sep99

The purpose of this discussion
is to draw from the personal understandings and perspectives of the class in order to understand the following:

Questions

  1. Does the "echo-Boom" generation have a high disposable income which would attract marketing people? - is this a myth or reality

    2.  
  2. Does this segment indeed buy products from the Net?

    3.  
  3. If they buy products from the Net, What turns a person on to make a "YES" decision on a web site

    4.  

     
     
     

Answers

  1. In the "sample" group investigated, there seems to be some difference in amount of disposable income, and source of income between people who are 20~25 and people who are 28~34. Some people do indeed have proportionately significant disposable income - and even if they don't, marketing people are under the impression they do. It is noted that younger people do not have as much income as stereotypically thought, but they are of strong interest to marketing people since these target customers have not yet formed strong brand alliances to certain products and services

    2.  

     

     

  2. This segment does indeed buy products from the Net - but: most of the purchases have been in single categories. Few people had made purchases in several categories ie. clothing, CDs, software. Of the people who had made purchases, a significant amount had made repeat purchases from the same e-tailer.

    3.  

     

     

  3. "YES" decisions are made cautiously wth an eye to security of the purchase transaction details and some hesitancy about the quality fo the product. Better information and more detailed information needs to be provided to create a higher level of comfort.

    4.  

     
     
     

In discussing "interest to purchases, money to purchase, and authority to purchase", we looked at the question of how do you determine disposable income? We discussed how some companies obtain demographic information through contest entry forms and other circumstances in order to build up name and address lists for direct marketing.

We also looked at how people literally got to the particular site at which they bought a product. Very few people went through a search engine looking for a key word. Most people knew the URL already from a previous TV ad or magazine ad or some other source. This suggests that advertising your web site OFF the web, is indeed a fruitful strategy.

We also talked about the tendancy of this segment to have a tendancy to want to customize all products and services to suit them exactly and recognized the challenge this was to e-tailers.

We concluded that knowing this information was valuable since it was precisely the sort of thing that marketing people wanted to know in order to plan the various e-commerce situations they created to capture the business of the segment represented by the class.

Edited from class conversation

www.witiger.com