Tapping the youth market
Manufacturers and advertising agencies have devised specialised strategies to tap into the lucrative child and youth markets. An example of this is the story of Levi’s Sta-Prest jeans.

At the beginning of 1999, Levi’s prospects looked bleak. Its share was falling in an already declining jeans market, sales levels were down and Levi’s price premium was steadily eroding. Levi’s own research confirmed its core customers (16–24 year olds) weren’t wearing denim the way they used to. Traditional five-pocket just weren’t 'cool' any more.

Levi’s research also found that unaided awareness of the brand had started to fall. More importantly, purchase intention scores, a good indication of the future, were also declining. "We needed an earthquake" was how one internal document described the situation.

The brand needed a rethink and switching the emphasis to a new product was the agreed way forward. Levi’s decided on a range called Sta-Prest and set about defining a new brand attitude that was more upbeat and positive than that of the 501’s world of lone heroes.

The Sta-Prest look was much cleaner and smarter and very distinctive. It had been developed in the US in 1963 when revolutionary technology was used to apply a permanent crease to the garments. In 1999, Levi’s reintroduced this process to provide a unique selling proposition for the brand. Levi’s knew that if the brand was to be successful it would have to regain the respect of its customer heartland.

Sta-Prest was a product that a new generation could own entirely for themselves. Levi’s advertising agency made a conscious effort to break away from the conventions of youth advertising, avoiding the use of conventionally good-looking heroes acting in a cool and rebellious way. They even went to the extreme of using a yellow puppet as one of the main characters.

The primary objective of the media strategy was to create a 'social currency' for target buyers by taking an integrated approach across media, which neither Levi’s nor its competitors had previously exploited. A first for any major youth brand, the campaign was launched through a series of unbranded emails aimed at opinion leaders across Europe. It was designed to create intrigue and a cult among the target market.

Although the ‘Flat Eric’ pan-European drive was a low cost campaign, it achieved remarkable cut-through, even by Levi’s standards. There was a 181 per cent increase in Sta-Prest awareness in the UK, 100% in Germany and 66% in Spain.

(Taken from Marketing Week’s Book of the Night, Centaur Communications Ltd.)

The famous Sony Walkman was produced because Akio Morita, Sony’s Chairman, foresaw a market for young people;

I knew from my own experience at home that young people cannot seem to live without music. … I remembered one time when my daughter, Naoko, came home she ran upstairs before even greeting her mother and first put a cassette in her stereo. I ordered our engineers to take one of our small cassette recorders, strip out the recording circuit and the speaker, and replace them with a stereo amplifier. ...It seemed nobody liked the idea... I even dictated the selling price to suit a young person’s pocketbook, even before we made the first machine.

Finding fresh blood
The Youth market is worldwide. Population size and growth rate are clearly going to be important indicators of market potential. However, age distribution is also important because it can indicate the types of product for which there will be demand.

In countries with high population growth rates there will be a relatively young population – most emerging countries are in this category. In contrast, the birth rate in most European countries is so low that populations are aging and static or falling. As this happens, projections show an increase in the proportion of elderly people in these countries. By contrast the new youth markets are the emerging countries of the world, and it is on these countries that youth marketing will be focussed.

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Content last updated: 31/01/2006

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