Cingular wireless go phone

Byline: Chris Sewell

There are millions of kids and young adults between the ages of 15 and 24 that shape Cingular's youth marketing strategy. Some are 16-year-old high school girls with braces on their teeth and freshly laminated drivers' licenses in their Hello Kitty backpacks. Others are unshaven fifth-year college frat boys in backwards baseball hats, still a little buzzed from the kegger the night before.

These kids aren't on Cingular's payroll, nor are they even aware of their marketing consultant roles. But with their existing numbers and combined spending power - and with thousands of 14-year-olds aging into the demographic every day - Greg Roberts listens carefully to their valuable advice.

"The youth audience is smart, and they know what they want," said Roberts, Cingular's director of marketing and national promotions. "If we don't give it to them, they'll try to find it someplace else."

The youth segment is simply too attractive for carrier to ignore: Their numbers are growing, they're tech-savvy and many have discretionary income to burn. But young people are an unpredictable, fickle lot, and keeping up with current trends is a constant struggle.

Although teens are stereotypically perceived as an MTV culture of videogame junkies possessing ferret-like attention spans, wireless carriers can't just toss flashy ads their way and expect them to line up like zombies for service. Ad campaigns have to be both entertaining and relevant to a teenager's daily life.

Most major wireless carriers have hipped-up their advertising campaigns in recent years and geared at least part of their marketing messages to young people. And when the Virgin Group and Sprint PCS roll out their Virgin Mobile USA joint venture later this year, they will target the 15- to 30-year-old market exclusively.

Although youth wireless penetration rates are less in the U.S. than in parts of Europe and Asia, where it hits 90%, The Yankee Group predicts that by 2005, teen wireless penetration in the U.S. will reach 68%, surpassing total market penetration. The firm's research also found that in addition to having an average of $4000 in annual discretionary income, by 2010 teens will comprise 21% of the total U.S. population and will represent the largest market segment in the nation.

But with so many wireless companies attacking the growing youth segment, teenagers are bombarded with marketing and advertising images daily. There's a lot of clutter and confusion about which companies provide phones and which provide service. And teens are not overly concerned with service providers and calling plans.

"Teens don't see what plan comes with the phone," said Michael Wood, vice president of Teenage Research Unlimited, a youth market research firm that lists AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Coca-Cola, MTV and Nike among its clients. "They just see that little Nokia phone and want to know where they can get one."

A cell phone's look is predictably important to style-conscious teens - the more features the gadget has and the smaller it is, the better (see story on page 46). And teens often go to extreme lengths to personalize their handsets. Many individualize their phones with ringtones, downloadable graphics, flashing lights on their antennas and removable faceplates.

While style is important, cell phones are not the status symbols they were just a few years ago, said Felicia Wu, 18, a high school senior in Berkeley, Calif., who is an intern at Youth Radio, an online broadcast outlet for young people training for careers in media.

Until recently, cell phones were equated with having money, and if you were seen talking on one, your popularity stock went up. But now that handsets are so common and ingrained into the culture, it's no longer a demarcation line between the haves and have-nots. "Nobody really thinks of them in terms of popularity," Wu said. "It's become so mainstream now that it really doesn't matter. I've never heard anyone say, 'Oh, you don't have a cell phone. You're not cool.'"

Cingular launched its youth-targeted Shoutout portal at the end of April. The Web site allows young people to join mobile communities and personalize the look and sound of their phones with faceplates and ringtones. It also helps satisfy raging hormones by providing romantic horoscopes and pick-up lines, and allows users to send anonymous "kisses" via a text messaging flirting game.

Cingular combines proprietary and outsourced market research studies, personal relationships and focus groups to help decipher the youth market. Before Cingular takes anything to market, Roberts said, extensive research helps the company determine exactly what youths want.

Cingular also relies on a young staff to stay in touch with the youth segment. Carla Noland and Jenny Zaworski are both 24 years old and senior managers of national promotions at Cingular. As recent college graduates at the upper end of the demographic the company targets, they are valuable resources to Cingular's youth marketing push. Both women conduct formal and informal marketing polls to find out what college students want from their mobile phone service. They speak with friends and younger family members who are still in college, travel to Barnes & Noble bookstores (a Cingular partner) on college campuses around the country and visit popular spring break locations like Daytona Beach and South Padre Island.

"Just being in the environment with the kids gives us a great opportunity to find out what they're looking for," said Zaworski. "It's almost a peer-to-peer relationship."

By staying in close contact with the youth segment, Cingular is able to know from personal experience what young people want from their wireless service without relying solely on statistical market research and focus groups. Noland, for instance, found that students wanted Cingular's presence on campus so they could pay their bills or ask about features directly, so the company struck a deal with Barnes & Noble and is now in campus bookstores around the country.

"Now that we have further input, we're changing programs that we have and implementing things that are more applicable," Noland said. "It's as if their own hands are touching the project."

Cingular's "What do you have to say?" tagline and brand umbrella based around self expression are both deliberate attempts to avoid defining "cool" for kids. Instead, Roberts said Cingular determines how the company can help teens define themselves, rather than Cingular defining what's hip for them. "We don't want to talk down to the youth audience, but from within it," he said. "We're telling them, 'Let us fit in with you.'"

In addition to an NCAA basketball Final Four partnership and, most recently, a "Spider-Man" movie tie-in, in December Cingular kicked off a promotion that took advantage of band Sugar Ray's song "Answer the Phone" - not exactly a promotional leap of faith, considering the almost suspiciously obvious song title and Sugar Ray's wild popularity with teens. Last year, Verizon Wireless sponsored an *NSYNC tour that targeted both the kids who attended the concert and their parents who took them.

The concert promotions generated significant interest in both firms but embraced pop culture only at its most commercial and mainstream. When Wireless Review polled a group of students at Thomas Kelly High School on Chicago's West side, most said that even if they don't like Sugar Ray or *NSYNC, it isn't a turnoff if companies join ranks with those bands. But one has to assume that the girl walking the Kelly High School halls wearing a "Spear Britney" T-shirt couldn't care less about popular culture and is in a smaller, more difficult-to-reach demographic.

TRU's Wood said it's risky for any company to rely only on the mainstream for its brand image because many teenagers who start trends are rebelling against what's popular. The challenge now is for companies to find new ways to complement pop icon strategies with meaningful causes that are important to teens.

"The formula is a little bit tired in terms of just looking at the most popular band right now and doing a promotion with them or sponsoring a tour," Wood said. "To truly be effective, you have to push the boundaries and look for ways to be more innovative."

Don McGuire, vice president of sales and marketing at Leap Wireless, said that while latching onto pop culture is easy and safe, Leap's strategy is to garner as many teens as possible and not necessarily paint the entire youth segment with the same pop culture brush. "We want to go beyond that and appeal to as many youths as we can in a different way than anybody else," McGuire said. "If we get the Goth kids or football players or cheerleaders - great."