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Understand cultural nuance for a great global youth strategy

With the back-to-school period in full swing, marketers are eager to engage with the youth demographic globally. Writing in The Drum, our Global Marketing Director, Emily Lowes, says key to this is understanding some important differences.

youth insight + strategy

Understanding cultural nuances can be difficult, especially when it comes to gen Z, an audience with a seemingly daily overturn of opinion on what’s cool and trending.

At Raptor, we’ve condensed our learnings from our most recent insight study of 500 students in both the US and UK markets in June 2024 to understand the core differences that will be integral to effectively reaching this audience in the coming year.

Popworks Student Sampling Activity

PepsiCo

Greek life

The first core point of differentiation between the UK and US market is occasions of socialisation. The youth audience is intrinsically influenced by its peers, and therefore it is important to understand how, and where, the youth audience is socialising.

While in the UK, 94% of young people move away from home to live in rented or student accommodation, in the US 11% of students still live at home whilst at college. This differentiation could be attributed to the comparative university fees per year, with US students paying up to four times in tuition fees comparatively to their UK counterparts.

For those students who do move away from home in the US, where they live and socialise differs drastically due to the significance of ‘Greek Life’. Across the US, sorority and fraternity culture is integral to the college experience with some campuses having as many as 40-50% of the student population actively participating in the ‘Greek’ system.

Greek Life influences the places that students live, how they make friends, and the values that they associate with, meaning that understanding and infiltrating these communities is integral to effectively reaching the youth audience. A fraternity party will become central to student social calendars, while comparatively in the UK a house party might happen once a week in rented student accommodation.

For UK students, extracurricular societies and halls of residence are integral to community building during the first year. ‘Sports Night’ socials are also integral to the social calendar, and creating communities on campus. For US students, sports teams hold a higher level of fame on campus with division one (D1) athletes followed by a wider network than their immediate peers.

“Understanding these cultural nuances in social occasions on campus allows for brands to authentically reach students during impactful moments of community building, leaving a long-lasting impression.”

Drinking age

Student spend levels, and what students are willing to spend on, differ significantly across the US and UK. Our study highlighted one core area of differentiation, within consumer preferences within food. When it comes to food purchases, the US sees a bigger student investment in eating out: DoorDash has supremacy with 78% of US students ordering takeout every week versus only 26% of UK students.

Alongside this, 89% of US students eat out every week versus only 24% of UK students. This differentiation is partially reflective of the cost of living across each market, with the cost of groceries in the UK being 22% lower than in the US. This means that UK students are more likely to see the financial benefits of buying from a supermarket in comparison to eating out.

However, this differentiation is also linked to where students socialize. With the age limit of alcohol consumption in the UK at 18 in comparison to 21 in the US, UK students comparatively spend more time socializing with friends in pubs, bars, and house parties. For US students, occasions with friends tend to revolve around food as a core driver of community, meaning that eating out and ordering in with their communities is commonplace.

Choose a channel

For brands looking to reach students this academic year, the UK and US share similarities in how the youth audience engages with brands. The majority of students across both markets noted that social media was a primary means of connecting with the brands they love, with Instagram as the leading platform for posting and TikTok as the core platform for consuming content.

Students noted that they followed brands on social media, and felt most connected to brands when they understood what they stood for. However, with the current political controversy surrounding the ban of TikTok in the US, there is potential for US social media consumption to take a seismic shift. Brands should continue to reach students across a variety of channels including loyalty programs, in-person activity, and traditional media to reach the audience in a multi-channel approach.

In the UK, a variety of brands, such as Wagamama and House of Fraser, have taken ownership of WhatsApp as a new method of loyalty communication with the youth audience with read rates of promotional messages as high as 84% compared to a standard read rate of 2.5% on email marketing.

For US students, WhatsApp is not used as a primary channel of marketing communication, and therefore brands looking to increase loyalty need to consider communication services such as Snapchat and iMessage to meet students where they naturally communicate.

The beginning of the new school year is an integral moment in which students may decide the brands that will stay with them throughout their university experience, with the propensity of becoming lifetime consumers.

“To effectively launch a global youth strategy, marketers must understand the cultural nuances between youth audiences and alter their strategies to engage these consumers.”