Teenagers only take in the here and now – so marketers must shift their thinking

Take my children, for example. They are teenagers and – God forbid – one day they will grow up into budget-holding buyers. It is therefore appropriate to keep one eye on how they behave today, just in case those traits stick with them as they mature.

One thing that surprises me is their attitude to communication – by which I mean the immediacy of it all. Though they are constant texters and users of social media, they operate only in real time. In other words, if you text them when it is not convenient, they will not bother to read or respond to your message. 

It’s the same with social media – while they are happy to write on people’s walls constantly and retweet the latest funny picture, this only applies if it is on their timeline now. They do not scroll back to see what happened an hour ago.

I have observed this elsewhere. They rarely listen to voicemails; they scroll endlessly through Sky listings for something to watch that is on TV now rather than play something they have pre-recorded; and they use music streaming sites to play genres they like, rather than individually choosing specific songs. 

Maybe this is being lazy, or maybe it is because there is just so much choice in the world they cannot be bothered to search. If you want their attention, you need to grab it here and now.

This has significant ramifications for marketers. If these characteristics follow through, we will have to be so much more precise in our timing and our targeting. Hitting one of this generation of customers at the wrong time will give us no second chance. 

Maybe this does lend itself to (a more advanced) form of marketing automation… or maybe it just means going back to a time when marketers really understood the buying signals of our customers and were able to react accordingly.