In This Issue
- Multi-Platform Multicultural Youth—New Facts & Figures, by Becky Morehouse
- Avoid the HiPPO—Data Is Your Repellent, by Matt Arnold
- A Response to "The Coming Meltdown" by Seth Godin
- Come visit us at Stamats' Annual Intergrated Marketing Conference!
Multi-Platform Multicultural Youth—New Facts & Figures
By Becky Morehouse, Vice President, Marketing and Strategy
Recent findings from Chicago-based C&R’s Research’s 2009 YouthBeat (an ongoing study of 13,000 kids, tweens, and teens) dispels some widely held beliefs about how, how often, and when multi-cultural youth access and use the web.
According to YouthBeat, African-Americans and Hispanics of all ages are keeping pace with their Caucasian counterparts when it comes to Internet usage. In fact, African-American and Hispanic youth surpass them when it comes to going online on an everyday basis. Roughly 2/3 (66 percent) of Hispanic and African-American (65 percent) youth are online at least three to five times a day, compared to 62 percent for Caucasian youth.
Here are a few additional highlights from the research…
- During the week, ethnic youth Internet usage is on par with Caucasian youth but on the weekends it is slightly lower (expanded school and library vs.
home accessibility is a likely contributing issue)
- Social networking sites are favored by both Hispanic and African-American youth. They use the Internet to build and maintain connections with peers. Ethnic youth (45 percent) mentioned social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace more frequently than Caucasian youth (35 percent) as destinations on the Internet
- A higher percentage of Hispanic (68 percent) and African-American (69 percent) youth have their own cell phones, compared to 54 percent of Caucasians who participated in the YouthBeat survey. Multicultural youth not only use the cell phone to communicate, they also use it to say something about themselves—they are more likely to have customized ringtones than Caucasian youth
Smart marketers are developing programs that directly address the widespread use of the Internet and cell phone among multicultural youth by integrating their campaigns. For example, Dr. Pepper increased its sales to Hispanic youth with a multifaceted campaign that centered around web interactivity. They used a theme song by a popular hot fusion performer that signaled to Hispanic youth that the company recognizes and appreciates the Hispanic experience. The campaign website offers downloads, commercials, contests, and even an opportunity to remix the song.
The main takeaway from this research is that we should dispel the notion that the Internet is a place where ethnic youth are underrepresented, but rather that it is a place where you’re most likely to find them.
Avoid the HiPPO—Data Is Your Repellent
By Matt Arnold, Director of Interactive Media Strategy
When engineering and modifying the visitor experience on your site, it is important to avoid the HiPPO. The HiPPO may seem innocuous, but can do quite a bit of damage. I’m not talking about hippopotamus amphibious (but left unattended on campus I’m certain one could do quite a bit of damage.) Instead, I’m referring to HiPPO as the acronym for the highest paid person’s opinion. This HiPPO can be like a bull in a china shop when it comes to web efforts and derail the best of projects. The best HiPPO repellant is data. Without data, it’s merely an opinion. When dealing in opinion, the one in power, usually the highest paid person, wins. Data is great; information is better. When it comes to the online experience, there are three types of research you can use to arm yourself for HiPPO:
1. Qualitative. This is usually in the form of focus groups, in-depth interviews, or ethnographic studies. With qualitative research you are looking for key themes. Themes can be organized via the three touchstones of intensity, novelty, and redundancy to help organize our qualitative findings: to what extent were there positive and negative ideas within a group or individual; were there new or novel ideas from the research participants; and to what extent was the information carried across groups or individuals?
2. Quantitative. This is usually in the form of surveys, polling, or analytics. While it is harder to gauge the level of emotional or symbolic currency an idea may have, quantitative data will help ensure a greater level of validity to your research findings. When it comes to the web, analytics is a great measure of what people are actually doing on your website. You may not know how they felt when they abandoned a task or completed a transaction, but now you have data to support what they are doing and not doing on your site.
3. Usability. Whether formal (using sophisticated software and video monitoring) or informal, usability is a key component in understanding what’s broken on your site. Unlike traditional quantitative or qualitative data, usability testing does not set out to prove anything, and you’re not using usability research in a manner that requires, nor promotes, statistical significance. Instead, it is there to uncover usability issues that need to be resolved to improve the site. From Jakob Nielsen’s research, we know that it does not take many participants to uncover the majority of your usability issues. For example, you can discover more than 85% of the usability errors on your site by testing less than eight participants.
These three types of research are not interchangeable. For example, just because you’ve done a focus group on a design does not mean you know if the site will work in a live environment. You need to do all three types of research on a regular basis if you plan to keep the HiPPOs at bay and deliver a meaningful experience that will prevent your site from being a commodity experience.
A Response to "The Coming Meltdown"
By Bob Sevier, Senior Vice President, Strategy
All in all, Godin has some great points. While I don’t agree that most colleges are organized to give an average education and that the link between education and success is tenuous, I do concur that cost, a lack of differentiation, and accreditation are problematic.
Not surprisingly, these issues are curiously entwined. College costs so much, at least at one level, because many colleges insist on having the same programs as their competitors regardless of the number of students interested in that program. In addition, colleges often have large academic cores that are designed, in part, to keep lots of faculty teaching lots of hours. Of course, the cost issue is exacerbated by the fall in family savings rates, a decline that began long before the current economic crisis.
If colleges largely offer the same programs taught by the same great faculty, then differentiation will always be difficult. Finally, accreditation, under the banner of maintaining quality, actually instills an academic sameness that further clouds the picture.
There is a notion among physicians that you never get someone’s attention until they have their first heart attack. Many colleges are having that heart attack right now. Revenue is falling far short of costs and there is no sense that the economic picture will turn around in the near future. As a result, they are forcing themselves to ask and answer tougher questions and to make decisions that should have been made long ago.
Dickeson, in Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services, has a wonderful yet sobering quote: “Most colleges cannot afford to be what they have become.”
This has become the tagline of higher education. I fear, and dread, that it may become its obituary as well.
There is no shortage of challenges facing higher education.
As a result, getting the right information you need to make the decisions you must has never been more important.
If there was a mission statement for our annual Strategic Integrated Marketing (SIM) Conference, I suspect that would be it.
Each year, we bring together some of the smartest and most innovative people in the country to help colleges and universities frame the issues, clarify the options, and develop tools to execute.
This year’s conference will continue that mission. Here are just a few of the sessions you can expect:
- Strategies to Increase the Marketability of Your Academic Programs, Becky Morehouse, vice president, marketing and research, Stamats
- Overthrowing Dead Culture: The Gumption to Change College Marketing, Brian Niles, CEO, TargetX
- Generation Digital: Photography, University Marketing, and Young People Who Think They Know Everything When It Comes to Pictures, Jason Jones, President, JonesFoto, Inc.
- How Social Media and Integrated Marketing Come Together, Fritz McDonald, Vice President, Creative Strategy, Stamats
- We have also scheduled three sessions of Topical Roundtable discussion to give you a chance to connect with the experts as well as your colleagues on a few of the most important issues in higher education marketing today.
This year's SIM conference will be July 18-20 in Chicago. Download your complete conference guide—schedule, presenters, biographies and location information—or visit us at www.stamats.com/sim2010.
If you have a specific question, please let me know, bob.sevier@stamats.com. I hope to see you there. |
