Create Winning Promotional Campaigns by Focusing on Your Specific Customer Base
When developing their advertising, many self-service laundry owners often forget that they are attempting to attract customers from a generationally and culturally diversified America.
And America has never been more generationally and culturally diverse.
As laundry owners, you need a deep knowledge of precisely who your target customers are and exactly what each group actually values. Understanding these behavioral and world view differences of the folks who walk through your front door every day is absolutely necessary to maximize gains from your marketing budget.
Unlike baseball caps, today’s marketing does not have the convenient feature of “one size fitting all.” As a result, I define a savvy laundry marketer as someone who reaches out for hands, but in reality captures hearts and heads.
Technically, there are five distinct generations recognized and living in the United States today, who are very likely to patronize your laundry business. Most of these individuals were born in the U.S., and they are as follows:
• Mature Silents: Born 1927-1945
• Baby Boomers: Born 1946-1964
• Generation X: Born 1965-1980
• Generation Y/Millennials: Born 1981-2000
• Generation Z/Boomlets: Born after 2000
To develop as many income streams as possible for your laundry business, it’s necessary that you treat each of these generations as separate and distinct market segments. This means that your marketing – including your advertising, of course – must reach out to each segment in the proper manner.
Not doing so is a significant mistake and will ultimately limit your customer base, as well as the strength, growth and future of your vended laundry business.
Let’s examine some general characteristics, world views and value systems of each generational group so that you can appreciate the differences between them and then construct your marketing messages to be positively received by each.
Mature Silents
These customers experienced their formative years during an era of conformity. They witnessed the birth of rock ’n roll, the creation of the suburbs, the invention of television and the introduction of Playboy magazine.
Pre-feminism women stayed home mainly to raise children. If they worked, it likely was only at certain occupations – such as teachers, nurses or secretaries. Men pledged loyalty to their jobs and, once they got one, they generally kept it for life.
They are avid readers (especially newspapers) and retirement means to sit in a rocking chair and live their non-working life in peace.
Baby Boomers
These folks are the “save the world” revolutionaries of the ’60s and ’70s – and the eventual yuppies of the ’70s and ’80s. They are the “Me Generation.” They are often self-righteous and self-focused. They quite often buy it now and use credit.
Women of this generation began working outside the home in record numbers and, thereby, changed the entire nation, as this was the first generation to have its children raised in two-income households where the mom wasn’t always ever-present.
These customers were the first “TV generation” and the first “divorce generation.” They can be characterized as optimistic, driven and team-oriented. They tend to be more positive about authority, hierarchal structure and tradition. They are one of the largest generations in the U.S., consisting of 77 million people.
Generation X
These customers are the “latch-key kids” who grew up street smart but isolated, often with divorced or career-driven parents. The term “latch-key” comes from the house key many of the kids from this generation wore around their necks, because they often would come home from school to an empty house.
They are entrepreneurial and very individualistic. Government and big business mean very little to them. They want to save the neighborhood – not the world. They also tend to feel misunderstood by the other generations.
They are somewhat cynical of many major institutions, which they believe failed their parents or them during their formative years and are, therefore, eager to make marriage work for them and to “be there” for their children. However, they are late to marry.
These customer are into labels and brand names. They want what they want when they want it, so many are in credit card debt.
They also are short on loyalty, somewhat self-absorbed and suspicious of all forms of organizations. They are individuals, cautious, unimpressed with authority and self-reliant.
Generation Y/Millennials
This is the 9/11 generation. They are nurtured by omnipresent parents, optimistic and focused. They respect authority. They live with school safety issues and have learned early on that the world is not always a safe place.
They schedule everything and feel enormous academic pressure. They have great expectations for themselves and prefer digital literacy inasmuch as they grew up in a digital environment. They get the vast majority of their information – and most of their socialization – from the internet.
They prefer to work in teams with unlimited access to information. They also tend to be assertive and boast strong views. They view the world as 24/7 and want fast, immediate processing of their needs and requests.
They don’t live to work – preferring instead a more relaxed work environment with a lot of hand-holding and accolades.
Generation Z/Boomlets
In 2006, there was a record number of births in the U.S. – and 49 percent of those born were Hispanic. This will change the American “melting pot” in terms of behavior and culture. In fact, the number of births in 2006 far outnumbered the beginning of the Baby Boom generation, and this will easily be a larger generation.
The Boomlets can be broken into two age groups right now: “tweens” (ages 8-12) and toddlers/elementary school age. A huge percentage (61 percent) of these kids have televisions in their rooms, 35 percent have video games, 14 percent have a DVD player, and 4 million have their own cell phones. They have never known a world without computers or cell phones. They’re savvy customers who have been oversaturated with brand names – they know what they want, and they also know how to get it.
Clearly, the above is strictly a general overview of the many different generational qualities. Of course, all of these qualities don’t apply to all of the people within each generational group. However, in general, they are accurate enough to be seriously considered when developing your marketing messages so that each target audience’s ears perk up when perceiving your advertisements.
Here’s the good news: recent research indicates that people of all different ages and demographics are becoming increasingly multi-platform-capable. Therefore, no matter what generation of customers or potential customers you’re targeting, it’s likely that whatever means you utilize to reach them will be effective in some form.
With that said, in preparing your marketing and advertising plans, the secret sauce is to know exactly who your audience is. Micro-targeting and customer segmenting is no longer an option in your strategy. You absolutely need to know what messages resonate, what strategies are effective and how to construct long-lasting relationships across all of generations and cultures that frequent your laundry business.
Here’s where to start: there is an excellent book on the subject that I highly recommend you read. It’s called “Targeting Your Market,” by Gabriela Taylor. In this book, you will learn the specifics of marketing across generations, cultures and gender. It’s available at Amazon on Kindle and in paperback.
In preparing tantalizing marketing campaigns for today’s consumer, it’s imperative that you do so with an eye toward customer diversity – because now more than ever the recipe calls for it to be baked directly into the cake.
