<p>As your brand continues to debate strategies to target a fickle young demographic, you may feel like you’re picking a lock with your marketing. There must be some timely combination of channels and messaging that will connect with the youth audience you need, right?</p>
<p>Maybe. But do you want to leverage generational marketing for your next launch and try tapping into some mythical trend that makes your brand the hottest commodity for one moment in time? Or do you want to stop reaching for the impossible and form a lasting connection with a multigenerational audience that speaks to their needs rather than their demographic details?</p>
<p>When you build a generational brand, your marketing gains a skeleton key. Instead of trying to unlock the secret to understanding a narrow audience, you address the real experiences that reach beyond the habits of Gen Z, Zoomers, or whatever label you choose.</p>
<div class="insight-upgrade"></div>
<p>In this white paper, you’ll learn:</p>
<ul>
<li>The lines separating generational divides — and how they shift.</li>
<li>Why trying to market to a generation leads to frustration.</li>
<li>How changing generational traits and trends leave market research behind.</li>
<li>What you need to be able to build a generational brand.</li>
<li>How Nike and the NFL remain authentic while capturing new audiences.</li>
<li>Why marketing to youth can’t be solved by being “cool.”</li>
</ul>


Traditional generational marketing segments an audience and focuses on the pieces. For your brand to resonate over the long term, you need a more holistic approach.

Your guide to creating a generational brand

How do you build a generational brand?

Worried about targeting Gen Z? Ignore the hype, trends, and media narratives to create something more durable for your business: A generational brand. Download our whitepaper now to learn how. Enter your email for the link.

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Get our whitepaper on how to build a generational brand

Whitepaper - 11/2022 - How to build a Generational Brand


“If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

Voices as varied as Tony Robbins and William S. Burroughs have expressed some form of this idea. And from the perspective of your brand, who could argue? Growth is essential to any business. However, as your brand looks to increase sales, you face two choices:

Do you double down on your current audience? You could always try and capture a bigger share of your existing market, or sell current consumers more products.

Or do you pursue an entirely new audience and find the growth you need by expanding your fanbase?

Both directions have merit, and uncovering the right course for your brand requires a blend of art and science. But you don’t need a high-priced consultant to unpack reams of data to identify new demographics with potential interest in your brand.

What you do need is to look at your brand identity and dedicate time to discovering where its values overlap with any audience you pursue. Otherwise, any money you dedicate toward audience expansion is effectively dead-on-arrival.

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## Core questions any audience expansion effort needs to answer

Expanding your audience isn’t as simple as turning on a tap to produce more sales. If you want to generate more revenue from your current fans, you need to consider three factors:

1. **Satisfaction:** How likely are they to stick with your product?
2. **Likelihood to recommend:** Are your fans talking with friends about your products?
3. **Total addressable market (TAM):** Does your brand have the potential to expand from its current sales reach?

Targeting your marketing toward [building a lasting connection with fans is critical](/insights/how-do-you-build-a-generational-brand). Even the most popular brands can quickly fall out of favor as its audience ages or as new trends arrive. Before long, you need to consider new areas of expansion.

Before attempting to expand into a new audience, you should understand the gulf that exists between your data and a successful campaign. [An assortment of software tools](https://blog.hubspot.com/service/social-listening-tools) and trend reports can aggregate anonymized details to indicate a huge TAM that’s potentially open to your business.

Imagine opening reports that indicate Quebec loves your brand, and so does Central America. Great news, but what should you do with this information? Numbers aren’t enough to develop a message that will connect with consumers. The larger question for your brand is, once you’ve identified the right audience, how do you reach them?

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## Understand a new audience’s needs before expanding your marketing priorities

Whether your brand settles on pursuing an audience of college-educated women gamers or [a broad pivot to young fans](/insights/marketing-tips-young-target-audience), finding the right creative is often the trickiest part. Too often, brands will get caught up planning how to adjust their offerings in order to capture a new market. For example, think of how many brands adopted “EXTREME” logos and gaudy color schemes to court the youth market in the X-Games era.

Obviously, this approach very often comes off as disingenuous. You don’t want to be the brand whose message comes off as [a convoluted version of introducing yourself with, “How do you do, fellow kids?”](/insights/4-tips-better-youth-marketing) You want to identify areas where your brand’s products organically overlap with what your audience is looking for.

Sometimes, brands get lucky. The shoe company Crocs was effectively dead with defiantly chunky, plastic shoes with limited appeal confined to kayakers and gardeners. Then, the brand started incorporating plastic charms into the shoes that allowed for personalization, and the idea took off among a new generation.

They have since leaned into this renewed popularity as their data continued to demonstrate the brand was experiencing an unlikely renaissance. But Crocs remain the same shoe even as they found a new audience.

Instead of attempting to reinvent your brand’s identity to suit a new demographic, your brand should look to groups with values that overlap with your brand. Then, you can uncover their motivations and angle your unique selling proposition toward its ability to satisfy those needs.

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#### One-on-one research is key to successful audience expansion

Getting to know your audience is crucial before leaping into a new market. You need to dedicate time and energy to listening on social media channels to understand your audience’s needs.

But along with social listening, you also need to examine your target demographic with one-on-one research. For example, we worked with a major gaming brand on an initiative to expand its reach among young women. We looked at the core message of the brand and tried to find areas of overlap with the problems this new audience was looking to resolve.

Along with applying social listening to develop early insights, we interviewed women in the target demographic. We never asked direct questions about the brand, but we talked about their needs to overcome anxiety and claim “me time.”

We focused the resulting campaign on the way the company’s portable console and its current titles allow for quiet moments of escape and relaxation. We didn’t encourage the brand to change, or develop new titles that could appeal to women. The brand’s story remained consistent while tilting slightly to accommodate a new perspective.

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## Know your brand before making a move to a new audience

Targeting a new audience requires more than building a full understanding of who they are. You also need to know your brand and how it’s perceived in the marketplace. The right outside marketing agency will ask the right questions of stakeholders and deliver a vital, objective perspective of your audience and messaging.

As your brand considers its many options to pursue growth, you can’t afford to rely solely on promising data and undercooked research. At We The Collective, we can help you uncover the deeper motivations and behaviors of your target audience by asking the right questions. Before you decide where to spend your advertising dollars on a new audience, [we should talk](/contact).


Successful audience expansion for entertainment brands requires more than market research. Learn how to uncover deeper consumer insights to grow your brand.

3 strategies to expand your entertainment brand’s audience

Look beyond the numbers before your brand pursues a new audience


Whether you’re launching a video game title, a toy line, an interactive app, a YouTube streaming series, or a social media platform like TikTok, you need a young demographic to succeed. After all, young people aren’t just your audience, they're nearly the center of the consumer universe with their disposable income and reserves of free time. As long as you hit the target, the appeal of your product will inevitably take care of the rest, right?

If only youth marketing were quite so easy. The fact is, if your marketing strategy aims for an audience no more specific than “young people,” you’re inevitably going to miss the mark. “Youth” isn’t some monolithic audience with a wealth of shared experiences you can reliably tap into for a given campaign. If anything, a young audience is even _more_ fragmented than market segments drawn from conventional age demographics like 18 to 24. The terms of Gen X, Gen Alpha or Millennials are just classifications that miss the nuance of the motivations and behaviors of a specific audience. The experiences of a 12-year-old can be vastly different from someone who’s 13 or 14. Plus, targeting a population such as children between ages 8 and 12 ignores differences in attention span and cognitive load at either end of the range.

Viewing a youth marketing audience as more than some homogenous mass is just one component of developing a more focused campaign. But even after you've narrowed your target audience, you develop a clearer strategy by looking beyond age and toward something more concrete.

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## Know who’s buying your product before building any campaign

Regardless of the age group your brand hopes to reach with a product, you need to think beyond its intended audience. More than the ideal user for whatever your brand is marketing, you also need to account for your consumer, who isn’t always the same person.

Imagine you’re creating a video game that targets an audience from 8 to 12 years old. At one end of that range, you have pre-teens who are earning an allowance and are just starting to make their own purchases. But at the other, you have 8-year-olds who clearly don’t have the means to buy anything. To make an impact on your sales goals, you not only need to effectively address 8-year-olds; you also have to motivate them to ask their parents for your product. School-aged kids have a strong influence over their parents, who ultimately hold the budget.

Or, conversely, you can develop a campaign that targets both audiences. Not only do you face the challenge of finding a channel shared by both parents and their children. You also need to thread the needle with a campaign that will appeal to two wildly disparate demographics. In cases like these, the message usually gets so watered down and broad that your marketing doesn’t really reach either group.

At best, a broad “spray-and-pray” effort will raise some awareness for your brand. But ideally, your marketing strategy should also incorporate two additional, more targeted ads: one for the parents, and one for the kids. That way, you can separately target the niches your product needs. But to find the most effective approach for a campaign, you should begin by looking beyond demographic details.

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## Focusing on motivation forms the basis for successful marketing

When you’re marketing to a young audience, you need to start by drawing a clearer target than a broad but meaningless demographic such as ages 8 to 18. Just as there’s a world of difference between the opposite ends of that range, young people change significantly in the span of a few years. There’s a big difference between the years 12 to 14 and 16 to 18.

Along with shifts in cognitive capabilities, today’s young audiences grow more sophisticated in their use of different digital platforms from year to year. The more specific you can be with the audience your brand is targeting, the more effective your message becomes.

But even after you’ve narrowed your campaign’s focus, you need to look deeper. Fundamentally, [marketing to a young audience requires different tactics](/insights/4-tips-better-youth-marketing "How do you do, fellow kids? 4 rules for better youth marketing"). Kids are more than just an age group. They’re a series of ebbing and flowing motivations and drivers. As marketers, it’s our job to understand those needs.

When you’re planning a youth-oriented campaign, the right agency will translate your target demographic’s numbers into motivators, triggers, and barriers. For example, a preteen audience may have just discovered game play, so they’re motivated by the feeling of winning. When marketing a game title to that age group, you may look to underscore the possibility of competitive rewards.

For teenagers, however, a sense of belonging grows more important. To stick with gaming, you could use a campaign to underscore the possibilities of playing with friends. For Nintendo’s Switch, one of the strengths is the [Joy-Con](https://store.nintendo.com/nintendo-switch/joy-con-controllers.html "Nintendo | Joy-Con"), which allows the controllers to be detached and shared. Underscoring those social capabilities is one effective way to target an audience that's motivated by a sense of belonging.

## Looking beyond age in youth marketing reduces assumptions

Given the realities of marketing to children, [brands are better off focusing on the emotions behind using their product](/insights/youth-marketing-find-the-moment "Form a lasting connection with your audience by marketing to a moment"). Reducing your audience to just a series of age ranges ultimately introduces some risky assumptions. There’s a danger in assuming everyone within a given demographic has the same experiences and interests, regardless of their age.

Honing in on your audience’s motivations helps skirt those tendencies. Motivators help a creative team start to craft stories for your customers and make informed decisions about meaningful visuals. By contrast, coming to your agency with the goal to target kids ages six to eight or Latinx women with your product offers no real actionable insights.

Determining the motivations of your customer is more art than science. After investigating some broader statements about kids of certain ages, your agency can test those assumptions to discover their value. But realistically, you also have to look at your brand and consider the motivators it’s tapping into.

Attracting a young audience may be a top priority for your brand, but thinking in such broad terms is no more useful than trying to create a campaign targeting all adults. To generate real results, you have to first narrow your focus to determine the customer _you_ really need. But to make a real impact on your goals, you need to then dig deeper to find what _your customer_ really needs as well.


Your brand needs to stop marketing to young people based on predetermined age ranges. Find out why a deeper dive is required if you want to succeed.

How do you build a generational brand?

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