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Tag: Generation Y

MasterChef – Generation Y Best Practice Marketing

MasterChef LogoMasterChef has been a huge surprise hit in Australia. The TV ratings have been sensational for Channel 10, with an average of 1.96 million viewers nationally (not bad from a total audience pool of just over 20 million). What keeps this average so high? The key, ironically, is the stickiness created by the side dishes. The MasterChef website gets an equally, if not more, astonishing 2 million views per week.

This website content is what keeps people engaged. Full show episodes stream very quickly from the site not long after screening, letting you catch up if you have missed an episode or just feed your addiction. Every recipe on the show is uploaded and available for those at home to have a crack, and beautiful images are cycled past the viewer. The taunt of “Can you master this MasterClass dish?” next to a picture of a beautiful coffee eclair is a great teaser to engage those at home.

The engaged community that has been built can be confirmed on Twitter. There doesn’t seem to actually be an official MasterChef twitter account, but that hasn’t stopped loyal fans creating unoffical ones and swamping Twitter with comments about how hungry they are, which recipes they love and who they want to get kicked off. The episode finished over an hour ago, but tweets are still coming in faster than one per minute. I really hope someone is monitoring this community really closely, what a great way to get feedback on the franchise directly from your customers.

Even if they are not monitoring the Twitter community, they will at least be monitoring their public forums. Yet another nod to the importance of communities in building a loyal following behind a brand. Over 30,000 posts proves that people are enjoying it, and breaking down the forums by participant gives a great selection criteria for the next season’s contestants (rumoured to be celebrities). Finally, they also have a Digg-like rating system on each recipe, so again the community can feel engaged and contribute back to itself.

How do you then cash in on this community? The product integration with Coles is subtle yet very effective. Recipes have a cost from Coles listed below them, for example this tasty soup is a mere $3.50 per serve. The PDF that you print to take to the shops of course has a Coles logo in the top right corner, as well as any notes about whether Coles stocks the item or not. They could have even taken this to the nth degree by having “MasterChef Prefilled Shopping Carts” from Coles Online, what armchair chef doesn’t want the ingredients delivered straight to their house? Even better, you could pre-empt the episode and deliver the Mystery Box challenge ingredients on the night of the Mystery Box episode! Now that would be challenging our engaged community.

The only thing that Channel 10 have done wrong, is screen Biggest Loser USA directly after MasterChef on a Sunday night. Then again, for some reason Biggest Loser makes me hungry too… 🙂

Gen Y Views

Generation YThere are a ton of Gen Y related articles being written these days, it seems everyone is trying to grapple with this ‘problem’. I read an article today on the MyCareer website which I thought was more perceptive than most, probably because it actually had quotes that I could relate to. The key quotes for me were:

(Gen Y) have always had security, shelter, money and they are
expecting the same things in their work,” he says.

“You find gen Y is choosing employers based on the types of training and development programs in place, but more importantly on the types of leaders that are in an organisation.

I guess my take on it is that although we take some things for granted (you only have to look at the unemployment figures to understand that), what really makes us tick is a clear development path. Keep challenging, training and giving responsibility and we will provide larger and faster ROI than you have seen before.

I guess the downside is that this progression has the ability to corrupt as well, and spoilt brat syndrome scares the pants off some employers. Clearly some writers have had bad experiences, but I would like to think that this was the exception rather than the norm. So don’t spoil your Gen Y with salary and cute projects, give them real challenges and keep up the communication and respect. Is that so complicated? 🙂

Multi-tasking and Productivity

Today I read a very interesting article that was powerful enough to knock me out of my blogging slumber. It is essentially a summary of a paper that was recently published at the International Conference on Information Systems. It can be found at the following URL (and was slashdotted here):

http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyId=14&articleId=281734&intsrc=hm_topic

man with two phones

So why was this article particularly interesting to myself? Well for starters it was based on a study of executive recruiters, who are my current employers. It was also particularly interesting as the theories presented back up the beliefs at the foundation of my new CRM system (my thesis). The article provides empirical evidence that multi-taskers are more productive due to their increased ability to handle parallel tasks. This is one of the key features of the CRM package, however it is also the thing that is taking the longest time to train staff to use.

I am even noticing a difference between Generation X and Y staff in this area. As this related article states; Generation X may have introduced multitasking to the work place, but Generation Y has perfected it. I am certainly finding that to be the case. This is also extremely important for the retention of staff. As multi-tasking becomes more embraced by the Generations, they begin to expect it to be supported and become frustrated quickly if it is not available. Some of my other favourite articles on Gen Y employees reinforce this message. Empower your staff with flexible, multi-tasking IT tools and they will be highly productive and highly profitable.

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