Reaching the Milennial Generation
Cal students born after 1980 are part of a highly-sociable, influential, tech-savvy and achievement-oriented group of consumers referred to as Generation Y or the Millennial Generation. As a generation that has grown up with technology at it’s fingertips, this group demands a dramatically different communication style than that of the Baby Boomers.
An interview by Andrew Tilin of bnet.com, with our very own Haas Business School Admissions Dean, Peter Johnson outlines how he speaks to the Millenial Generation.
BNET: How do millennials first reach out to Haas?
Johnson: They often listen to our podcasts, which we started about three years ago. The idea to create one was suggested by someone in our marketing office. I said, “I can’t imagine anyone listening to this.” But after two weeks, we found out how many people listened, and the figure was almost a thousand. Being a non-millennial and a skeptic, I made our tech verify the number for me three times. When he did, podcasts became an imperative.
BNET: What’s on the podcasts?
Johnson: They’re about the admissions process, financial assistance issues, program content — that kind of stuff. We try to make them conversational. We still regularly get 1,000 unique visitors a month. We also have students writing blogs; the bloggers are given guidelines like “don’t use profanity,” but we don’t censor them, even though I was initially resistant. Now I know it was the right thing to do. If you censor a blog, it sounds like a marketing message, and the millennials can read right through that. We’ll probably be adding video blogs.
BNET: Blogs, video blogs, podcasts — aren’t you going a little overboard? Can’t you just send potential MBA candidates a catalog?
Johnson: It’s not enough to have a printed publication. They’ll never look at that anyway. You can’t use a single information channel with millennials, because that’s not how they gather information. Our solution is to push out our message through more and varied channels.
To view the entire article, please visit the link below.
Source: “How to Speak Millennial” Media Week
