The future of your business depends on how well you understand young people.
Neil Wilkins Podcast
Neil Wilkins talks to We Are Futures founder, Mark Fawcett, about the importance of listening to and understanding 16-24 year olds when creating strategy, marketing and a direction for the future.
In this enlightening conversation, Mark guides our thinking and shares what we can do to really benefit from a deep understanding of the emerging generation of influencers, leaders and decision makers.
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Media Shotz
Alex Young, Managing Director, We Are Futures
“It is no secret that the advice is to advertise through a recession for proven success in the long term but, more than that, hard times provide the perfect opportunity to open a gap on your competitors.
“Anyone prepared to forge a different path and harness the right channels and methods to reach people in a way befitting of the specific circumstances in which we find ourselves, will come out on top.
“Younger consumers are especially likely to notice those brands who use their voice to make a positive social impact.
“By switching up conventional ad campaigns in favour of investing in partnerships and projects that aim to establish a deeper connection with consumers, marketers can grow both the brand and drive its influence simultaneously.
“The numbers may show growth now, but there is no getting away from the fact we are heading into a period of uncertainty, so brands who are bold and challenge the conventional advertising patterns will almost certainly be those who come out stronger on the other side of a recession.
“Words always matter but actions combined with words will win at this time.”
Top 100 influential people
Mark has been announced as one of the winners of the Top 100 Influential People of 2023!
The awards are new and were created to highlight and reward truly influential people who affect and impact society today, across a broad range of sectors. The guiding principle is that people who are genuinely making the world a better place need to be encouraged, thanked, and given every opportunity to get their message out.
Mark joins an illustrious group of winners which includes Steven Bartlett, founder of Social Chain, sculptor Sir Amish Mikhail Kapoor CBE, Dame Sharon White, Chairman at the John Lewis Partnership, the Olympic gold rowing medallist James Cracknell, Ben Francis CEO of Gymshark, and even Joe Wicks!
Mark has been a huge influencer in the field of social mobility for two decades.
He opens up unprecedented opportunities for disadvantaged young people, is benefitting business, investing in UK plc and creating a more positive, skilled and talented workforce.
He genuinely revolutionised the way businesses support young people and education, which has resulted in an additional £200m being invested.
He has worked with 250 businesses, charities and government organisations, delivering real social impact at an unprecedented level and overwhelmingly focused on deprived areas.
His focus areas are: skills, jobs and opportunity; fairness, diversity and empowerment; health and wellbeing; environment and climate change; the arts.
Example programmes:
More than 18 million young people have benefited directly from his work.
The full list of 100 winners and their bios can be found in this link below.
Bethan Staton, Financial Times
It is the session before lunchtime at University Technical College Heathrow, and a class of sixth-formers is learning about risk and reward.
The students are lively and engaged, debating whether mortgage holders really own their homes, the risks of trading bitcoin and the ethics of gambling. The lessons are not just academic: many of the 16 and 17-year-olds have part-time jobs, and some are already considering apprenticeship offers or student loans.
“We’re of an . . . age to learn about this — to learn how to save, invest and not spend recklessly,” said Myron Mascarenhas, who in the past has traded and even mined bitcoin. “We need the money — we’ve got to save up for what we desire.”
UTC students are not alone in wanting to learn about money matters. With the launch of its Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign last year, the Financial Times set a mission to democratise financial literacy with free, engaging content for young people across the UK.
“At FLIC we aim to help young people cope with the reality of everyday life now — from guarding against crypto scams to the fact it’s much harder for this generation to secure affordable housing,” said Aimée Allam, FT FLIC’s executive director.
While financial education has improved in British schools, there is still a long way to go, with teachers citing persistent barriers.
According to a 2021 survey by the London Institute of Banking and Finance, almost three-quarters of 15 to 18-year-olds said they wanted to learn more in class about how to manage their money. But only 15 per cent of the 2,000 students surveyed said school was their main source of financial education.
According to an all-party parliamentary group that is looking at the issue, financial education in the UK is “patchy”, with many exposed to money from a young age but unequipped to handle it.
“It’s probably one of the things they’re asking for the most,” UTC teacher Louise Kelsh said. In her classroom, there is a gulf in understanding, with students way ahead of teachers in areas such as cryptocurrency, but lacking knowledge of more mundane aspects of money management.
Sharon Davies, chief executive of education and employability charity Young Enterprise, said teacher confidence, lack of access to support and training, and a dearth of incentives were causing financial education to fall off the timetable.
“Teachers are under enormous pressure, so even putting it on the curriculum is not enough,” she said. The subject is not on the statutory curriculum in English primary schools but has been for secondary schools since 2014.
The Money Charity, which focus on money management support, described its inclusion as a “Pyrrhic victory”. Financial matters, it said, were still not taught consistently due to a lack of “resourcing, teacher training and prioritisation”.
Mark Fawcett, founder of We Are Futures, a branding agency that connects companies and schools, said that greater accountability in educational establishments could improve matters. He suggested including financial education in school inspections and making teachers answer for not focusing on it.
But educators insist supportive measures — carrots rather than sticks — are more effective. Government funding for England’s schools has fallen in real terms in the past decade and, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank, will return to pre-austerity levels only next year.
That would leave budgets squeezed, even as schools face additional demands to help children catch up on lost learning, and progress emotionally and socially in the wake of years of lockdown disruption due to the coronavirus pandemic.
According to a study by survey app Teacher Tapp, 63 per cent of teachers said a lack of time was the main barrier to creating a financial education programme. Training is also a problem: 13 per cent cited a lack of subject expertise as the main obstacle.
“We tend to have shovelled more and more into schools’ responsibilities overall, without taking anything out,” Fawcett said.
This, he added, has affected disadvantaged children disproportionately as the schools they attend tend to be more stretched. “Children from families that are having the most constant money worries are being given a one-hour lesson from a PSHE [personal social health and economic] teacher who may not be trained in the subject.”
At UTC, a focus on vocational learning underscores the importance of financial education. For time-pressed teachers, Kelsh said teaching tools make a big difference. Last week, pupils learned about interest rates, debt and gambling from lessons produced by banking group NatWest.
“For many teachers [reluctance to teach finance is down to] a lack of confidence about how to teach something which they think they’re not good at themselves,” explained Caroline Edwards, financial capability lead at the bank.
Not all resources are created equally, however, and experts such as Davies warned that having materials but no guidance on how to use them made deciding what to teach difficult sometimes. “We need to mark the quality of these products,” she said.
That, in part, is why the FT created its own charity last year, the Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign, to share access to trusted financial education.
“A crucial element of financial literacy for young people is the ability to recognise when they are being marketed to. Financial education should be for everyone, not just potential clients,” said Allam of FLIC.
A lack of financial literacy can deepen inequalities as wealthier households tend to have more time and resource to teach children about money, according to a survey by financial advisers. Research by St James’s Place found that teenagers from more affluent background scored more highly in financial literacy tests than their peers from households with lower earnings.
While working as a teacher, Tom Harbour was struck by the influence of background on education, and founded the charity Learning With Parents to help families learn about school subjects together.
“Schools are asked to do so much, they are the social workers, they are the core curriculum providers, and they are everything else,” he said. “Things like providing financial literacy are always going to fall down the list.”
At UTC Heathrow, students believe action on financial education cannot come soon enough.
“When we are young, it’s very easy to think we’re going to have this money, and keep getting it,” said Foad Hussein, who saves 75 per cent of money from his parents and part-time work, in anticipation of becoming financially independent himself.
“But . . . it’s not going to be like that forever. You’re going to have to start paying for stuff soon, and it’s going to hit when you move out.”
https://www.ft.com/content/a385c715-3541-4eb7-8f41-19b9c21a41a1
Alex Young, Creative Brief BITE
Predictions are never easy, and as we end 2022 mired in a heady mix of cost-of-living crises, rampaSignificant cultural and behavioural shifts could create an exciting marketing landscape
The butterfly effect of any occurrence – big or small – is impossible to predict, or to detect, until long after the event, and the bigger the incident the wider the ripples will spread. When the pandemic hit in 2020 the narrative through the advertising industry echoed that from the last recession. Businesses were encouraged to spend through the hard times in order to limit the damage to their bottom line. And now, no sooner is the pandemic behind us and businesses have dusted themselves off than we are back in a real recession and the story feels like it’s all been told very recently.
However, the pandemic was responsible for a significant shift in the way many brands connected with the public and one that will be critical as we go into 2023. They discovered the power of positivity, of using their might for good. And that has, to an extent, continued into 2022. Over the past year or two we have seen a marked increase in brands engaging with a more personal approach to marketing: more impactful campaigns, consciously making a positive difference to people’s lives and working hard to get more personal with consumers.
Consider some of this year’s Christmas ads as a prime example. Several brands – from Co-op to M&S – chose to use their annual moment in the spotlight to showcase a good cause. And John Lewis produced a very literal nod to human connection with its film about a foster dad going that extra mile (on a skateboard) to connect with his new charge. All a refreshing change to the usual focus on food, gifts and general excess.
Over the past year or two we have seen a marked increase in brands engaging with a more personal approach to marketing: more impactful campaigns, consciously making a positive difference to people’s lives and working hard to get more personal with consumers.
Alex Young, Managing Director, We Are Futures
Meanwhile on a day-to-day basis consumer giants like McDonalds, Samsung and Sky are putting marketing spend behind projects that are designed not to shift goods today, but to build a stronger connection with the public through campaigns based on education, opportunity and upskilling.
Whether it’s offering school leavers the chance to train on the job, mentoring young tech entrepreneurs or delivering an expanded arts education to cash-strapped schools, each of these businesses – and scores more like them – have diversified their marketing spend towards things that positively impact people’s lives.
And if you’re wondering how to sell the notion to the finance director, it’s not exclusively virtuous. By focusing on delivering life-changing projects to young adults, you are also investing in the consumers of tomorrow. Your consumers of tomorrow: Those people who grew up seeing your brands as a positive force, one that inspired them, gave them purpose or just provided a much-needed leg up into a career. That dedication will pay off in spades down the line as you earn the trust and loyalty of tomorrow’s wage earners.
But, as an increasing number of brands move towards positive storytelling in 2023, it will become more important than ever to live those stories. The phrase “be the change you want to see in the world” has never been more pertinent. Young people today are savvy and switched on. They don’t stand for disingenuousness or a lack of authenticity. Saying the right thing is not enough – they respect the brands that do the right thing, and whose external values are carried through into every facet of their business.
The secret, I believe, is to treat people as partners, not consumers. The world is moving on from the purely transactional “we-sell-you-buy” model and instead is becoming a two way street. People have a need and a brand has a solution. In providing that solution businesses can go some way to improving lives and experiences.
Education and skills building programmes that help a young person hone their skills and progress in a chosen career, personal banking challenges that improve financial literacy, and schemes that celebrate equality and diversity will all set a brand apart for originality and a commitment to change.
Actively creating opportunities for change, rather than just talking about them in marketing materials and advertising, will give a brand credibility and act as a proof point to discourage any talk of virtue signalling.
All this points to an exciting time for advertising in 2023 and beyond. I’m deeply hopeful that next year will mark a turning point in businesses creating amazing purposeful and personal connections with people. The subtle shifts over the past few years, coupled with the changing expectations of young people, are now resulting in a wave of new behaviour, so much so that those marketers who fail to adjust in time will, I fear, be left behind.