A question of values
Every marketeer knows about values. They are the brick and grout that let you build your brand. Values are that which makes your brand truly special and – far more important – what lets you connect to those you want to market to.
If your brand’s core values are a neat fit for the values of your customers, you’re in for a winning streak. The products basically sell themselves, money is almost thrown your way and everything is peachy for a while.
Now, the catch is “for a while”. What do you do when your customers change? What when they grow older? What do the “new” young people like nowadays? Without any previous research, most of the persons asked were quick to say something like “gadgets”, “technology” or simply “modern stuff”. But is that true?
People of tomorrow
It’s not a coincidence that the author picked this topic for an article: at the NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences, the second year students of the International Media and Entertainment Management program are tasked with creating a roadmap for a brand, starting from a vision and values, to finally arrive at a product or service.
What’s remarkable about this is that the students have to create a vision first, derive their values from that and only then (after some more steps) arrive at the actual “thing”.
With some 150 students in the second year, aged between 18 and 24 years (excluding a few outliers), the outcome of that assignment should be of tremendous interest to the industry, for here are many of the future makers and(!) customers of brands and products.
By the time this article was written, the projects were still “work-in-progress”, but a certain trend could already be inferred. Across almost all groups, the students who were asked had their values in a surprisingly similar arrangement. Please bear in mind that this is still a sample test – we are very curious to know how true it holds in the end.
Oh won’t you please take me “home”
The general “modern stuff” approach of the initial replies is amazingly quite off-target: the young people of today have values as “warmth”, “togetherness” and “family” written in large letters on their banners.
Is this groundbreaking? Hardly so, but yet it may prove to be an inkling of a future road we will have to travel with our brands, maybe a breeze of the wind that’s to carry us in the times to come. One could say, it’s a trend in the making.
We at trendblog.net will keep you updated on this!
