Voxburner Youth Trends 2015 Round Up

The Youth Trends 2015 report focuses on key insights within the themes lifestyle, digital and content, in the run up to Voxburner's YMS 2016 event.

In the run up to Voxburner’s

YMS 2016 event taking place on 7th, 8th and 9th March next year, we’ve decided to take some time out to look back at Youth Trends for 2015. The report focuses on key insights within the themes lifestyle, digital and content.

Read on to ensure you and your team are clued up on the current trends of the moment affecting 16-24s. For those attending next year’s event, this will stand you in good stead to learn about future youth trends for 2016 and beyond via Voxburner Founder Simon Eder’s keynote and the accompanying Youth Trends 2016 report, which will be distributed to attendees on the day.

Youth Trends 2015:

Lifestyle

Righteous attitudes - young people are moving away from the rebellious ways of Boomers and Gen X-ers. We see a refreshing attitude towards wholesome values - working hard, getting involved in local communities, loyalty to friends and family.
Growing pains - young people crave guidance in everyday life whether it be finance, relationships, careers.
Life skills - young people want to know how to cook, budget, do laundry. They often turn to the Internet / YouTube to learn how to do things.

“This is more proof that Britain’s youngest generation is its most serious minded in a long time. I call them the Recession Generation because the economic downturn has made them more realistic and meritocratic.”

— William Higham, CEO, Next Big Thing

Digital And Tech

Trends covered:

Time is precious - young consumers expect everything right now. They work to shorter time-frames within the digital sphere. They lead busy lives and anything that can make things quicker or easier are welcomed e.g. Uber, Click and Collect.
Digital innovations - it’s all about utility. Which innovations are must-have and which are over-hyped?
Integration of digital and physical - brands that are blurring the lines are winning. e.g. Polaroid connecting with instagram / Twitter photos; mobile check out in Apple stores.

“For 2015 and beyond, bedroom brands will be huge, with platforms like Big Cartel and social media trading groups underpinned by PayPal.

It’s not explicitly a digital innovation, but the combination of lots of entrepreneurial, imaginative young people and community platforms, social media, micro-payments, crypto-currency, 3D home printing (the list goes on and on…) is already establishing shopping cultures that are totally independent of brands and really exciting.

It’s pure DIY – and vital for the emerging maker movement.”

— Liz Cheesbrough, Crowd DNA

Content And Interacting With Brands

Trends covered:

Hyper-connected - Content needs to be hyper-connected and accessible when and where the reader wants it to be. It also needs to be interactive via (not only) social media allowing young people’s opinions to directly influence new ideas.
Hacking the norm - Brands that are winning are completely rethinking the way they go about creating, which in turn enables fresh content and a new way to deliver. Think podcasts, TV shows only available on YouTube
Cross-media - Content creators are switching to different fields and platforms to re-engage their target audience and entice new ones - TV shows that have apps, TV shows developing gaming apps - this invites a new audience in.

“It’s hard to achieve - but ‘viral guerrilla marketing’ campaigns are always interesting and get people talking. So, pop-up stores in King’s Cross, drones dropping off cereal at schools... it’s all about doing something unique and ‘OMG’ in order to get noticed above the noise of everyone else.”

— Brenda Wong, aged 21

Images courtesy of Gratisography.

We’re pleased to offer Digital Doughnut readers an additional 15% off YMS tickets – just use discount code DIGITAL15 when booking your tickets here: http://www.voxburner.com/buy-tickets/

From the Voxburner Editorial Team