The X Factor effect and how brands need to recognise the changes in youth behaviour

I’m 44 years old and grew up in a village outside Plymouth in Devon. Having moved there from Oxford, it never felt like to most cosmopolitan place but I don’t think my childhood years were that different to millions of others of my age.

But young people today are totally different in some of the things they think are normal.

When I was on holiday recently I was talking to a good friend of ours Chris Bentley who lives in Kent.

What we noticed was that when we were kids, if you wanted to speak out loud in a language lesson (only French and German in those days) and try to put on the best accent you could, then you were seriously weird.

But now kids seem to love languages. Listening to my 12 year old son taking care of all the ordering for us on holiday and priding himself on the Spanish accent would never have happened when we were kids. Just use English louder was far more normal behaviour.

And then there’s singing and dancing.

I recently went to an School X Factor event where 13 finalists, who had been whittled down from many more entrants, were prepared to stand in front of all their peers and sing their hearts out. The standard was amazing.

Again, if you danced at a school disco as a lad, you would have been lynched.

But any brand needs to address these changes. Staying cool is tricky at the best of times, as tastes and norms change so completely over long periods. Even Google is being pegged back by the US investment market as it is not showing the growth it once was and is being overwhelmed by Twitter and Facebook in many areas.

Apple are now the most valuable brand according to the same Fortune article, but can even they keep it up for another generation?

So whilst looking at how your brand presents itself, sometimes it’s not just a design change that’s needed, it’s a cultural, brand definition change.

And that’s far more scary.

Malcolm Gladwell chooses between Pepsi and Coke?

I think we can all get a little distracted by brands and branding. Convinced of our own brilliance and self glorifying world that creating a quirky little logo will have the punters pouring in.

Well I’m here to dispel that rumour. It won’t.

A good logo on its own will not win you a single customer. Not one.

A bad one can however, stop you even being considered for calling up.

Bad logos are hateful, every designers worst nightmare and we love the glow from great work. Peer respect is important in almost every industry and we all feel good when our work is rated.

But it’s the product that really matters, branded or not.

If the product works and people feel comfortable with owning in – no proud to own it – no even delighted to give you their custom and eulogise to their friends about how great it is, then you know you have a potential winner.

So here’s one for you. Which search product is better?

Bing – Microsoft’s new baby
Google – the worlds most dominant search provider
Yahoo – yeah, remember them?

Well now you can see, in a blind test. Judging only by the efficacy of the product. How quickly did it give me exactly the answer I was looking for, how efficiently my problem was solved or how painless the experience was.

Try it for yourself with this Blind search tool.

It comes from a very clever man called Michael Kordahi who has his own blog here.

It means the branding is irrelevant and you have to choose on the results.

Now I will add the caveat here that blind testing is not always a faithful predictor of what you are going to do in future. Martin Lindstrom in his book Buyology massively disproved that, but it will make you think.

Now Pepsi also tried this with their own taste tests. For years they proclaimed that people preferred the taste of their brown fizzy water over Coke’s but it still didn’t translate into long lasting sales. (although it did prompt the launching of ‘New Coke’ if Roger Enrico the former Pepsi CEO is to be believed.) Latest thinking shows this is more to do with it being a sweeter drink (which is easier to like in small quantities) than it actually being preferred as a long term brand ‘friend’.

Anyway, try it for yourself. See which you think really works, brand or no brand.

Thanks to Niall Kennedy, for the use of the Malcolm Gladwell (my hero) Pepsi v Coke image

Cheers

John