Late last month we were lucky enough to have Curt Cuscino in to give a talk called Marketing to Millennials. Curt, just barely a millennial himself, is an entrepreneur and is the Founder and Principal of HypeLife Brands, a progressive brand development and marketing agency accelerating brands into the hearts and minds of the millennial generation.
Curt led a wide-ranging lecture on what makes marketing to millennials different. We will hopefully be posting videos from Curt’s talk to the Knowledge @ CSUF Entrepreneurship series but here are a couple of notes that I took at this event:
- “Millennials are the largest generation on earth with over 75 million people having been born between 1980 and 2000”
- Whether you love or loathe millennials, chances are that they are at least a small portion of your customer base and, more realistically for most, millennials represent a large part of your customer base. You need to know how to market to them if you want to just keep up.
- “Millennials are connected to the internet virtually all the time”
- And they don’t have the same viewing habits as other generations; TV ads may not be the best way to reach them. But I don’t think TV should be totally discounted, it’s just that companies really need to think through what it is they are trying to accomplish and pick the appropriate medium.
- “Millennials tend to be more tribal”
- I think that this is true and part of the reason for this has to do with being online virtually all the time. Thanks to the internet the barriers to setting up highly focused group are almost nonexistent nowadays so you will get communities that have very specific, and perhaps even narrow, interests.
- “Millennials want authenticity”
- What Curt is saying here is that millennials are not open to traditional advertising techniques where you have the company telling the viewers what they should think. I think part of the explanation here may be that thanks to the proliferation of entertainment mediums the bar has been seriously raised on how brands communicate.
- “Millennials value experience”
- Concerts and festivals like Coachella are examples of this. I’d probably ad something like an escape room and Curt brought up the example of how Apple has been able to make owning all of their electronics more life an experience than a simple product.
Curt did go into some details about how he and his company, HypeLife, go about marketing to millennials. Once we have them, we will start to publish some of the videos from this talk to the Knowledge @ CSUF Entrepreneurship series.
It was a great talk. In order not to miss any of our upcoming events you can become a CSUF Entrepreneurship Insider and get weekly email updates about our community of entrepreneurs and innovators or you can view all of our events over on Eventbrite. Either way, we hope to see you soon!
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