Click and tweet; Connecting with the Millennial Consumers

We are in 2016 and we are trying to solve the biggest mystery of all time, what is going on in the mind of the millennial. In this article, I am going to discuss about who is the Millennial, why they are important, and what are their behaviours.

Who are the Millennial?

Millennial or the Gen Y is a generation of people who are born between 1980 until 2000. Those who are Millennial who reads this article may want to share with me your feed back about this article. What makes you different from the previous generation? What shaped your behaviour, your biases and your preferences.

1980s saw the advent of the internet. The millennial grew up with the notion that internet is norm rather than a new innovation. Its part and parcel of their lives. In 1997-98, we have the Asian financial crises. When they about to enter college, there were another economic crises in 2007-2008. All these events had inflicted invisible scar on the millennial, which later shaped their attitude and how they view the world.

Why the Millennial is a mystery worth to solve?

The answer is they are the future. One third of Malaysian around 10.1 million from 31.7 million of Malaysian total population are millennial. To claim that millennials are the future is an understatement. The future is here.

Connecting with the millennial

in 2012, Coke in Australia launched a “share a coke” campaign. It’s genius. The campaign connects the consumers back to drinking coke. It brought Coke back as part of the local culture, part of their lives. This campaign reconnects with the consumers, gets personal, and make the consumers as part of the brand. As the millennials are highly connected with the social media, they share their experience with their friends and making consumers as their brand ambassador. 

Being  well educated, they are very confident in themselves. Millennial like to take control of their own life. They will decide what they want, where they want it, and when they want it. 

Try to act like a big cold corporations, you may find that millennials shy away from your products. Remember that millennial like to have control of their own life. So stop telling millennials what to do. Let them decide. Don't  push them what to buy, let them decide. Start being their friend. Build the relationship and you create loyalty.

Millennials have little trust on advertisement. They trust their friends and family more. They even trust strangers that give a review on particular products or service. For example, if you play video on youtube and there is an advertisement before the video. You have to watch the advertisement for a few second and there is an option to “skip ad”. How many will watch the whole advertisement or click the “skip” option? This may cause a serious questions on the effectiveness of advertising through social media. Social media may create brand awareness, but when the decision to buy or not to buy, they will look whether their friends buy the same thing. 

The future

Millennial is the next who will hold the purchasing power or even the king maker to decide who will be next in the government. Most of the study on millennial’s behaviour were done in the other part of the world, especially in the United States. Due to the different culture, if we use the same method of research to study the Malaysian millennial’s behaviour, it will be interesting to see whether it will bear the same result. In fact, some companies like Viacom in the US had already start researching on Generation Z, the predecessor of the Millennial.