If Kahneman had a teenager

Teens - or Gen Z, if you will - are emotional, even the monosyllabic ones. There are a lot of emotions happening on the inside and on the outside, in the way they express themselves to the world: The status updates about what they are doing and how they feel about it, emoticons, and GPOYs show the world just how they feel as they feel it. Despite all this, marketers still struggle to understand teen behaviour and decision making and still try to understand and research it in ways that ignore the emotional. So, how do we begin to understand and communicate emotionally with this group - who come with enormous potential buying power and influence?

Early in my career exploring youth identity, I once was asked to moderate a focus group with some 15-18 year old boys in the United States about books. This was, without any shadow of doubt, the hardest group I have ever had to deal with. These boys were unhappy from the moment they arrived at the facility. Faced with other strange kids, they were sizing each other up, and were very concerned about their self-image - there was no way they were going to say something at the risk of looking stupid despite all my assurances and wheeling out every moderator trick in the book. They were all tired and unfocused because the computer game Black Ops had launched at midnight the night before and most of them had been up playing it through the night.

Situations such as this highlight the need to better understand teens and what makes them tick, so that we can create more meaningful communications and connections with them. Had the focus group taken place another day and time, the group might have been a bit more responsive and engaged. Without the right research framework in place, today’s teens will remain an enigma, despite them being happy to share if we can find a way to connect with them.

Many teen studies that take place, like with my focus group Black Ops fiasco, prove to be a challenge to researchers, however, the bottom line is that marketers often need teen buy-in for their brands, as they tend to be early adopters and directly influence the purchasing decisions of their friends and family. So, this begs the question: who are today’s teens? How are they different from other groups? And how do we research them most effectively?

Marketers and researchers aspire to find the best method to provide insight into today’s teen behaviour, but tend to operate under the misguided notion that teens are fundamentally different from other ages and groups and that we need to develop totally different and special ways of squeezing information out of them. In reality, teens are influenced by environmental, social and personal factors - just like everybody else.

As behavioural scientists like Daniel Kahneman have shown us, the best way to understand teens is to examine their lives through a behavioural lens, looking at environmental, social and personal factors, just as we do with any other cohort.

Observing teens through a behavioural lens reveals that while physologically and emotionally they are the same as they have always been, the environmental and social factors around them have changed considerably in recent years, and that their world is very different than the one previous generations have grown up in (as a frame of reference, for a while poor Pluto wasn't even a planet).

It is at this point that our research bias often creeps in, with researchers understanding the experience of teens today from the perspective of their own teenage experience – but today’s teens are not like the Brady Bunch or The Breakfast Club. It is important, though sometimes difficult, to leave personal bias out of teen research. When I was that angsty teen, I spent hours playing Tetris on my GameBoy slouched on the sofa trying to do anything to escape the unequivical boredom of a seemingly endless Sunday afternoon, but I realize that my experience is very different from the pressured, constantly connected and over-stretched ‘young adults’ of today.

This generation understands the implication of not doing well enough, so their ambition has to be much more focused and practical. As a product of a global recession and an unstable job market, there is no time to be bored. The pressure to get into a good university and acquire a good job propels them into countless extracurriculars where boredom is no longer their primary motivation.

In the same way that baby boomers were a product of wartime and food rationing, with strong attitudes toward things like wasting foods, this generation comes armed with unconscious attitudes of their own (think reduce, reuse, recycle). They're living in a very different world than even teens from five years ago, and only a behavioural framework can effectively analyse this.

The frame of analysis we use to provide insight into the teen cohort is exactly the same as our overall approach to human behaviour, which is to concentrate on three sets of factors:

Environmental
Refers to the world of context, where they are in the moment. And asks questions like 'Where is this teen?', ‘What is their environment like?', 'What is their home like?', and ‘Where/when do they hang out?' Decisions are not made of our context, and our context continually changes.    

Social
Refers to the fact that we are social beings and self-deceit machines, far less individual than we think, with the propensity to copy central to human behaviour. It probes questions like 'What social or cultural factors affect the teens?’, 'What experiences are they sharing?' and 'What are the dynamics involved with others around them?'

Personal
Is based on how we feel, our raw emotions. It explores questions like 'How does the teen feel emotionally/physiologically?', ‘How do certain brands or themes make them feel and why?', 'What is going on inside them?'

With a behavioural approach, we can gather emotionally rooted data that helps clients to improve their positioning, concept creation, communications and R&D for their teen segments.

By understanding the environmental, social and personal factors that influence today's teens, marketers can make informed decisions in all business areas - from NPD to brand communications to in-store experience. With this behavioural science approach, we can tap into and understand the unconscious forces that influence teen decision making, and help marketers understand what this means for brands.

Dominique joined BrainJuicer in 2012, and is currently Client Director, Juice Generation and BrainJuicer’s resident expert on teens. She has over 10 years of experience spanning academic sociological, social and market research across such categories as exploring youth identities, youth fashion trends, teenage pregnancy, teen sexual health, teen diet and nutrition and teen government sex education campaigns, among others.

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