College Marketing & Teen Marketing for Today’s Top Brands

For a while Tina Koh saved all her shopping bags, but she has gotten over that. Now she collects them only for milestone purchases. "If I buy a Louis Vuitton purse, I'll keep the bag," said Koh, 19, a second-year student at the University of California at Berkeley.

Not so the drab plastic sack from Urban Outfitters, where Koh spent $65 recently for a sundress. That gets ignored in her lap while she pauses at a cafe near the campus, and will get tossed out as soon as she gets home.

She is equally decisive about designer denim. "I don't care how much I spend on jeans, as long as they look good on me," she said. "I don't mind spending $300 if they flatter my body.

"True Religion jeans are my favorite," she said, naming a brand that starts at $172 a pair. Her favorite this season, at least.

Koh, a psychology student, spends about $500 per month on clothes. She knows all the hot brands, and the not-so hot (hint: 7 jeans are so last month). She does not believe in back-to-school shopping because she shops year-round - to amortize her fashion investments across a steady stream of purchases, she explained. Her parents pay her living expenses, but to support her clothes habit, she works at a genetics lab on campus.

With a considerable monthly income, virtually no financial obligations, an attitude open to experimentation and long-term brand preferences and loyalties congealing with every purchase, Koh is exactly the kind of consumer that marketers in sectors from toilet paper to technology are vying to connect with. And some very smart companies - including publicly traded blue-chips like Apple, Nike and Gap - are doing just that.

College students account for more than $175 billion in consumer spending, according to a study by Harris Interactive, and as their ranks grow along with their income, they have become an extremely desirable segment. The same study found that more students are enrolled in universities this year than ever before - 16.5 million in the United States alone, the largest college class in the nation's history.

As many consumers curtailed retail purchases because of rising fuel prices and growing economic pessimism, college students have increased their spending by almost 16 percent since 2003, with discretionary spending soaring to a record $41 billion, a 24 percent increase from 2003 to 2004, according the report.

In addition, a study conducted by BIGresearch and sponsored by the National Retail Federation found that back-to-school college spending this autumn will exceed $34 billion, accounting for the second-largest shopping boom of the year, after the holiday season.

In Europe, students have a spending capacity of more than 61 billion, or $76 billion, according to a 2004 study by Label Networks, a research concern specializing in the youth market. Kathleen Gasperini, senior vice president of Label Networks, whose clients include Apple, Nike, Vans and PepsiCo, said students were increasingly seen as a force to be reckoned with in Europe and Asia as well in developing countries.

"Some people might say, 'University of Ukraine, who cares? They're not on my radar.' But you should care, because they are a huge population and they're going to be the labor market tomorrow," Gasperini said.

All of these numbers and strategies are lost on Koh, who couldn't care less about efforts to win her hard-earned cash. "I don't really pay attention to advertising at all," she said, taking a sip of bottled water. "I'm kind of jaded to it. I don't think it makes a difference, because we've grown up in that environment."

Advertisers have traditionally viewed the college years as a crucial window, because that is when lifelong habits are formed. When they enter the dorms, many students receive boxes of freebies: deodorant, candy, condoms and coupons - a carefully mixed cocktail of products they might consider handy in college and beyond. "Many of their loyalties are going to be solidified during this period," said Samantha Skey, senior vice president of convergent marketing for Alloy's 360 Youth media and marketing division. Students are willing to try new products, but once they lock into a brand, the commitment tends to be long term.

"Tomorrow this is going to be an enormous audience of grown-up salaried adults," Skey said. "It's going to be even more difficult to get them then."

But, as marketers are discovering, it is increasingly difficult to get them now. Just wander into any university. People are far more absorbed in cellphone conversations and tuned in to iPod headphones than to their surroundings. In places with no campus culture, like metropolitan universities in Europe, it is even harder to get their attention. "The kid goes home for lunch, so you can't just put something up in the student union and they're stuck staring at it," Gasperini said.

And when students live with their parents and still hold jobs, they may have even more disposable income for gadgets.

"If you're a young working person in China, India, Thailand, Malaysia, you stay at home; you're not paying rent, said Amitava Chattopadhyay, a marketing professor at Insead, based at the business school's Singapore campus. "Even though on paper you may be worse off than in Europe or America, you're much better off, so you're able to spend more."

Many students turn to each other before the media for information. For inspiration on fashion, entertainment and technology, they watch for trends among celebrities and peers, and before making purchases they read product reviews online and e-mail friends with links from Web sites to ask for input.

At the Berkeley cafe, Koh and a friend recalled how they instant-messaged each other with links to a Kate Spade bag they were eyeing. The verdict? Too boxy.Savvy, jaded, distracted, and loaded. It's quite a quandary.

"How do you reach this very tech-savvy consumer when he or she is multitasking or parallel processing across different programs?" Skey said. "It's a different kind of consumer, who's absorbing media differently."

Matt Britton, managing director of Mr. Youth, a leading company in college advertising, said this situation had resulted in nothing less than a revolution. "Students are controlling their own media consumption, 100 percent. The ability of brands to reach students through traditional media just doesn't exist anymore," he said. "It's a paradigm shift, and marketers are realizing that, and shifting. Text messaging, different online methods, blogging, podcasting, event marketing. That's really the future."

What these trends have in common is that they all invite potential consumers to interact with ads and with each other. And increasingly, advertising is disguising itself as content. More generally, companies are finding that to connect with students, they need to do it on students' terms.

Consider the online social network Facebook, founded by a Harvard University student, Mark Zuckerberg.

With 3.7 million registered users, an 80 percent penetration rate at participating schools, and an anticipated start at more than 1,000 more campuses this month, this Web site offers advertisers direct access to a very precise population they want to reach - and a population that wants to be reached.

Students fill out profiles with interests and hobbies, and advertisers can offer promotions and discounts based on those keywords. For example, Apple awarded a free iPod shuffle every week to someone who included "Apple" in his or her profile.

"In terms of what we offer to advertisers, it's an accessibility to a college audience that is pretty unparalleled," said Chris Hughes, a senior at Harvard and spokesman for Facebook.

"We are connecting them to the people who say they have an interest in that product. It means there is a way to find a population you want to advertise to and serve them with relevant information on a consistent basis."

What is significant about Facebook and sites like it is that the user feels in control. People do not think they are being advertised at. They think they are surfing friends' pages.

Gap adopted an interactive strategy at watchmechange.com, in which users design models that look like them and then watch their virtual selves strip down to underclothes and then slip into a new outfit. The Web site is a form of "viral" advertising, a networking frenzy that attracts viewers through virtual word-of-mouth buzz.

Erica Archambault, a Gap spokesperson, did not disclose how many hits the site had gotten since it went up in July, saying, "We want to let the viral nature of the ad take effect."

Traditional methods are not entirely passé either. Jason Bakker, of the marketing firm Campus Media Group Worldwide, toured university campuses to determine the best ways to reach students. "We were expecting to see every student sitting on a laptop, playing on a Blackberry," he said. Instead, he found many were also writing in notebooks and reading the newspaper - in print.

"It kind of told us that you can use traditional advertising and reach students," Bakker said. "We can still put up a poster on a bulletin board or put an ad in a campus newspaper and they're likely to see it."

The continuing challenge as new types of marketing emerge? Grabbing students' attention without seeming overly aggressive, and offering a personal, relevant and trustworthy message, regardless of the medium, experts said.

"There are a lot of players in the youth or alternative marketing space," Skey said. "It's a tough jungle out there. Plenty of companies will give it the old college try and just end up as part of the noise."