Whether you’re a member of Gen X,Y,Z or a Baby Boomer, you and your generational peers are defined by a bundle of psychographics meant to help marketers ring your bell. Boomers are optimistic. Gen X’ers are skeptical. Gen Y or Millennials are ambitious and Gen Z are still in school. Accurate or not, that’s how marketing strategies are built. But where does that leave Generation C?
In addition to your age-specific generation, you might also be a member of Generation C. The key to Gen C membership lies in your responses to the following five questions:
- When you travel, do you pull up your boarding pass on your smartphone?
- When you get paid, do you make your deposit through a mobile app?
- Do you notify Uber when you need a ride?
- Is YouTube your go-to place to find new recipes?
- Do you turn to Yelp for restaurant reviews?
If your answer was YES to all five questions, then you’re a member of Generation C, a generation defined by heavy smartphone use and preference for consumer generated content. Unlike other generations, membership in Gen C is not a question of age, income, ethnicity, gender or other demographic features.
How Take 5 Media Group
Reaches Generation C Consumers
To illustrate how this would work, we use our fictional American family, the Robinsons, whose 16-year-old, Gen Z daughter, Zoe, qualifies as a member of Generation C. Zoe uses her mobile device to shop, get around, and communicate with her peers on social media. She has just reached the age to get her learner’s permit and spends hours on her phone looking for a car, which her father has promised to buy her if she finishes the school year with a high GPA.
- Audience Building: Our surgically-precise, omni-channel platform, powered with real-time data, tracks consumers’ social, digital and mobile behavior. Take 5 has Zoe’s father and mother in its database and factors their demographic information into Zoe’s purchasing decision. Her social media profile and online activity classifies her as a teenage female looking to acquire her first vehicle.
- Understanding: Your advertising and marketing strategy starts with customer data and key attributes such as social media preferences, device usage and brand loyalty. By understanding how Zoe acts and thinks online, we reach her on behalf of our auto industry client, who can then turn the lead into a sale.
- Targeting: Knowing Zoe’s preferred browsing device, shopping preferences and spending habits tell us where to place relevant auto ads and in what format. We maintain a proprietary universe of 200 million cookies, built and constantly refreshed. It is generated through current and past Pay-Per-Click (PPC), social or search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns.
- Engagement: Any click or open from a visitor that comes through our deployment platform (PPC, Social, SEM, etc.) is retargeted with display ads on a variety of platforms, including Google AdSense, Facebook, Media.net, Twitter, Pandora and others. Zoe is highly likely to see our client’s car ad.
- Retention: Winning a new customer costs four times more than retaining an existing one. Retention is particularly challenging with Gen C, a market segment known for withholding loyalty from all except brands that deliver consistently, each and every time. With that in mind, we make sure Zoe keeps seeing her interests advertised on the devices she uses and help our clients plan promotions that will keep her engaged.
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