The Student Challenge

The students of the today are becoming an increasingly difficult market to reach. Students, let’s define them as a person between the ages of 17 to 25, are smarter than ever before with more experience as consumers. Television advertising no longer holds the same captivation as it did with prior generations while newspapers and magazines become less read by younger individuals. When on a quest for information, we, as young adults, do not look to the printed media or chance television advertising. Rather, we turn towards our first love – the Internet.

I’m sure it comes as no shock that the Internet is quickly becoming a crucial factor in communication. The information superhighway is well charted territory for most major organizations with hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent on websites. The tricky part becomes using the internet effectively.

Any company can have a website, actually any person can. What must be considered when creating a website is functionality and aesthetic appeal. When I go to a company’s website looking for information about their newest product and find an ugly page, I am immediately disheartened. That isn’t to say that a site must be a symphony of motion and colour; simply visually appealing to make a potential customer feel at ease that the company may understand the internet. Functionality is even trickier and even more important. If a website is too difficult to navigate, students will give up and find their information elsewhere online, where the message cannot be controlled. Fashion at the expense of functionality is not acceptable.

By their nature, students are social creatures. More than this, they are capable of moving, gracefully, between different and distinct social groups. Spending one night with high school friends and the next with the friends met in residence comes to them as naturally as breathing. That socializing has come to an art through the internet. Online social networking tools have become an instant hit for organizing young people. Facebook has spun into a web of interconnectivity, allowing users to create detailed profiles of themselves as well as groups for likeminded individuals to gather and share opinions. Drawing students to an event has become precarious due to social networking, as students can use Facebook and instant messaging services like MSN to communicate across great distances to organize large groups. For example, two special events running simultaneously at two separate businesses would, in the past, have split the local student population for attendance. The two operations now must contend with online social networking pre-organizing people as well as instant messaging being used by opinion leaders to sway multiple individuals at once to come with them to their event of choice.

Now we come to the crux of it all – opinion leaders. Word-of-mouth has always been the most effective form of marketing; reference from a friend adding more legitimacy to a recommendation than that of a television advertisement. Now, more than ever, we must rely on the opinion leaders of target markets to effect change in behaviour. This signals a shift in the marketing strategies of some companies, who have previously rested comfortably on their advertising budget. By shifting a focus to online marketing with a strong representation by specifically targeted opinion leaders, companies can take advantage of the changes in the trends of student life rather than combating them.

Students will always be an ever-changing target market. Difficult to pin down, they present constant challenge to marketing managers across the country. Despite the problems, they are well worth the effort. Students represent the catalysts for change in the coming future and having impact on them in the formative stages of their adult lives can be extremely lucrative, leading to extended brand loyalty in the future.