NEW YORK — For most beauty companies, going after the teen market isn’t optional, it’s obligatory. Now, a new online marketing service called The Y Report hopes to help marketing executives by gathering information from that group.
The Y Report, based in Verona, N.J., was started by Jason O’Neill, a former marketing executive at Schering-Plough, Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Generation Y, he said, is made up of preteens who are at a crucial point in their consumer life spans. They’re using products, watching TV and movies and reading fashion magazines, but they haven’t developed brand loyalties.
“They’re searching and impressionable, but they’re also very fickle,” he said. “Peers and advertising are a major influence.”
The Y Report gathers and analyzes its own data via consumer participation on the Internet. As it turns out, that’s a particularly effective method for preteens, who spend a disproportionate amount of time online surfing and e-mailing friends.
“This is one of the few audiences that is on the Internet, so you get a perfectly representative sample,” he said. As for why the Web site focuses on beauty, he said: “I had to pick a segment and beauty has very high peer visibility. When a girl puts on a product, she is making a statement.”
There are some fairly universal truths about teens, O’Neill has found: “They’re in malls, they use the Internet and catalogs. They spend more time alone, so they’re looking for community and shopping is one way to do that.”
O’Neill and his staff create questions “that range from very simple ones about awareness and usage, up to complex questions about their attitudes and values.” For example, one of the questions asked for November 2000 was: “Which of the following factors contribute most to brand coolness?”
Subscribers to the Y Report can click on that question and read the responses, which have been analyzed from various angles from the straightforward response frequency — 66 percent said the quality of the product contributes to brand coolness, while only 5 percent said it made a difference if a pop icon used it — to a more analytical — “Generation Y has moved a step beyond her baby boomer parents, linking quality with coolness, i.e. quality is no longer a functional attribute only, quality is in the realm of emotion.”
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Analysis is provided by Victoria Alin, the Y Report’s editor who comes from stints at advertising agency Leo Burnett and fragrance supplier Dragoco.
“We try to go behind the numbers and find out what is driving brand success,” said O’Neill.
Data can also be sorted by region, age, ethnic background and how much the respondents say they spend on beauty in any given time frame.
The Y Report doesn’t just focus on purchasing behavior, though. The service aims to present a complete picture of the teen world.
Its Ad Scout service breaks down what beauty advertisers have spent in various magazines, and how effective those spends have been, based on circulation and readership. For example, according to Ad Scout, Adidas Moves ads got 14 million impressions in the top 15 magazines this November, followed by Cacharel’s Noa at about 11.03 million. In the same month, Glamour had 15 pages of fragrance ads while Teen People had only four.
The Web site also presents users with collated data from other sources, as well as a bibliography of teen behavior, via links to relevant articles.
“We don’t produce data like ‘What is in a teenager’s bedroom,”‘ said O’Neill. “But we’ll find it.”
Right now, said O’Neill, the service is only tracking fragrance data, but ultimately it will add skin care and color cosmetics.