Philadelphia—The young are a fickle, every-changing lot that can prove hard, if not impossible, for merchants to market their products to, which is why a group of online merchant pros in the space took the stage Tuesday at the eTail Conference to discuss challenges specific to brands doing business with youth.
Nathan Decker, director of e-commerce and customer service at Seattle-based discount skiing, snowboarding equipment and outdoor gear merchant Evogear, said that marketers have many opportunities to get a brand message into the youth culture in an inexpensive way. Decker, whose company was founded only four years ago, said that creating a free MySpace profile proved extremely successful. Within one month of creating the profile, the company already had 700 friends.
Sarah Casalan, vice president of IT and e-commerce at New York-based apparel merchant Marc Ecko Enterprises tempered Decker’s optimism and told attendees that while social networking sites are a great way to drive traffic, they need to continually look for top-line traffic that will translate into higher conversion rates. Marketers need to rethink standard metrics like conversion rates “because you’ll bring people here that may not be intending to shop,” Casalan said.
For example, her company created a spoof video of chief creative officer Marc Ecko spray painting “Still Free” on Air Force One, which received widespread media exposure, Casalan said. But conversion rates and site visits went down during the time of peak interest because rather than going to the company’s Website and making a purchase, people were visiting media outlets and other informative sites to learn about the video.
Most important, panelists agreed that the marketing message and medium need to be something popular with youth. “You need to be relevant,” said Casalan, giving the example of MTV not advertising its recent 25th anniversary because it would make them seem old and irrelevant to its youth audience.