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by Graham Brown Last week we established 3 reasons why youth are important to your business. Now you have the business case, how do you start to manage the youth market? Before we jump into segmentation, lets rst look at youth market. A good a places as any is to start with music because if you want to understand young people today, look at the changes in the music industry: Musical genres like rock, pop and world music have become irrelevant Successful artists like Jay-Z, Madonna and Bowie transcend genres Success has moved from servicing a genre to joining the dots between them Music is an analogy for identity and, therefore, a powerful insight into marketing. Consider these points in terms of marketing: Market segmentation has become irrelevant Successful brands like Red-Bull, Apple and Amazon arent dened by segment Success is about dening your own tribe of followers and connecting the dots between this diaspora
For Carter, he tells the story of a young black man, hustling the streets but if you look at the industry data, between 65% and 85% of hip hop fans are non-black. (sources: Soundscan, SMLG, MRI). Without the white kids, rappers like Notorious B.I.G and Busta Rhymes, all who attended Trenton High with Jay-Z would simply have been niche artists rather than multi-millionaires. A recent Soundscan report concluded that as much as 70 percent of the paying (and downloading) hip-hop audience is white kids living in the suburbs. Hardly the projects in Brooklyn. After a recent gig at Arizona State University, Jay-Z issued a press statement that said there is no black or white music anymore, just good and bad music pointing to the blurring of lines in a once heavily demarcated musical genre. How can hip-hop be the sound of the ghetto the president be black and the nations most popular hip hop artist (Eminem) be white? Traditional music marketing offered and black & white view of the world Demographics used to be an effective tool for predicting behavior but not anymore The shared themes that connect people across demographic and genre are more predictive of behavior and attitude
Traditional marketing bases categorization around how customers relate to products, modern marketing needs to base it around how customers relate to each other. Modern marketing needs to move beyond demographics and psychographics and look at connecting people through the shared stories that are meaningful to their lives.
The future lies in connecting the dots between these diffuse digital diasporas the fans that sit across segments and the advocates that transcend demography. As Jay-Z said on his Forbes interview, I didnt focus on any particular demographic, I just focused on telling my story.