How Millennials Are Changing Branding

Back in business school, in order to learn quickly and efficiently, I would compare and contrast different compaigns on my own time. Even if you don't have a trained eye for branding, anyone can gain some insight when you see big companies doing something over and over again. You can start to ask the right questions that lead you to useful insights. Remember, corporate Titans have the money to research everything, and not only that but they experiment for the sake of profit. We can learn a lot about any of their campaigns if we look at them under the right lens.

Many small businesses still make the mistake of going with what looks good, what is pleasing to the business owner, and what matches. While that is happening in mom and pop shops across America, something more calculative is happening in the branding and marketing machines of the Titans.

Now, I know that mom and pop shops don't have lots of money to invest on research and development or focus groups, but that is one more reason to spend time observing and asking questions about what Fortune 500 companies are doing and why they are doing it. Who are their target audiences and why?  Asking these questions will lead you into an autodidactic journey.  

As you can read in the headline below,  Coca-cola is printing unique labels for 2 millions Diet Coke bottles.  

Coca-Cola is partnering up with Gefen Team, Q Digital and HP Indigo. Coke wants no two cans to be alike. They want to convey to their "Diet Coke lovers that they are extraordinary by creating unique one-of-a-kind extraordinary bottles" - said Alon Zamir, VP of Marketing for Coca-Cola.  

Here is another example: Budweiser is teaming up with Hewlett-Packard to create unique cans. Again, why would Coke and Budweiser go through the trouble of customizing their cans?   The next question you should be asking is if this is going to be available to the public as a whole or if they are launching these special cans to a select few and "extraordinary" individuals.  And it just so happens that both Coca-Cola and Budweiser are launching their products at concerts and music festivals.  

The aforementioned leads to the following questions. Who is their target demographic? Who are these out of the ordinary special and unique beings?  Obviously, it is mostly young people that have always gone to music festivals. So let's talk a little bit about this young generation. 

Gen Y, a.k.a. Millennials, do develop brand loyalty, but not in the usual sense, as they become attached to brands based on quality and individual engagement. Millennials are known to be sophisticated technology-wise and immune to most traditional marketing and sales pitches, as they grew up in the midst of almost every marketing ploy.  In the United States, they are more racially and ethnically diverse and therefore more segmented as an audience.  To Millennials, personal finances are important in brand loyalty considerations, as they barely have enough resources to keep up with their day to day expenses, with almost two thirds of them needing their parents to co-sign when buying a car, renting an apartment, or attempting to get a credit card, often with disasterous results to their co-signers.

So what is the Coca-Cola / Budweiser marketing strategy based on?  Mostly the following presuppositions.

Millennials are unique. 

    

Where can we find many of them? Music Festivals!

How do we appeal to their Uniqueness? No two cans are alike! 

 

The fact that Millennials develop brand loyalty based on quality and financial constrains more likely than not means that all that extra packaging cost and investment is going to go nowhere.  Here you have potential collectible products way down the line, but they are going to be distributed in a place that makes it almost certain that they are unlikely to survive as collectibles.  In the middle of their partying, Millennials will just pick up the next cheapest can in the pile, whether it's Pepsi, Coke, Budweiser, Coors, or whatever. Sometimes corporate experiments can go horribly wrong , and sometimes tried and true strategies are precisely so because they work.


So what do Millennials actually want?


Answer: SOME CONCERT TICKETS!

Score this round a win for Pepsi by going with a tried and true traditional marketing strategy.