How to trust Gen Z and selling through a storm
In the internet era, little care is shown to putting your brand in the wrong place. In this week's FWD, brands are willing to throw billions of dollars at platforms that users themselves wish didn't exist, and the most popular growth engine in finance tends to produce the most unhappy clients.
FWD Edition 101
In the old days of advertising, placement was everything. As one of the infamous "4 Ps" of the business (the other three being Product, Price, and Promotion). Sadly, most marketers have spent the last 15 years getting trained on a different set of principles: Clicks, Traffic Leads, and Coercion (CLTC). (No cute alliteration here, in part to show just how clunky the current system is.)
But back to place.
In the placement view, it was critical that your service be seen in places your ideal buy would be, sure, but as importantly, in places where it would be put in the right context. You don't want your elite limo service advertised next to the Super 8 Motel.
What these old Mad Men understood was that the human brain makes associations, quickly and beneath awareness. Your parents knew this too, always telling you to be careful who you hang around because you don't want to be seen as "part of that crowd."
Strangely, in the internet era, where CLTC is the name of the game, little care is shown to running with the wrong crowd. As we'll see in our first article, brands are willing to throw billions of dollars at platforms that users themselves wish didn't exist, and the most popular growth engine in finance tends to produce the most unhappy clients.
All this and more, in this week's damns to give.
Save your Gen Z 🔥hot takes🔥
I lived through the "aren't Millennials terrible" era which was preceded briefly (cause we barely exist) with a "Gen X are going to ruin the world" cacophony. Now we are berated daily with fear-mongering "these kids and their screens" diatribes, most recently from Scott Galloway, a man who is very smart and also very convinced that his way is the highway.
But recent research from the University of Chicago shows that its actually our current crop of 20-somethings that know the truth about those little handheld mirrors into our souls. I was particularly struck by this stat: 57% of college students who are active users of Instagram would prefer the platform didn't exist.
Engagement is tanking. The once-imagined "creator class" (a brand name made up by Meta and Google to get people to post their best work for free on proprietary platforms) is scrambling against an algorithm that threatens their livelihood, and the users themselves aren't interested.
Most firms we deal with are just now thinking about "what should we do on social media" as if it were table stakes. But is it? I think not. Nuanced and tactical uses of the platforms still have a function. But paying an agency to make graphics, spin up dry blogs, and repost them on your social channels? 2016 called; it wants its strategy back.
A good way to lose team members and clients
It's no secret that consolidation in the RIA (investment advice) space is the new norm. In our Capital Idea publication, we discussed the strategy and its pitfalls in depth.
Recently FA Magazine highlighted disturbing new data about the exodus of talent and clients in these mergers. I can only imagine the turmoil a former United Capital client who was sold to Goldman Sachs, resold to Creative Planning, and then snatched out from under Creative Planning by breakaway advisors trying to set up their own shop, all within five years.
Consolidation is essential for the sector's long-term viability, but it's not the panacea it's been painted to be, and it certainly should not be considered without a well-structured team and plan.
We've advised firms through the buying process and developed an end-to-end methodology to retain as much of what you're buying as possible. Without major structural controls, M&A in financial services is a dangerous game.
The world's hardest sales job
The biggest headline in Higher Ed this spring isn't the battle over student debt relief or another round of misleading headlines about the value of a college education.
It's the high-drama, high-stakes fallout of the newest Free Application for Student Financial Aid (FAFSA to his friends), a required government process to receive financial assistance at nearly all of the U.S.'s fine institutions.
College admissions is the hardest sales process in the world right now, and it's not even close. Add to it that the entire thing has been wrapped around the FAFSA for generations, when that FAFSA process implodes, the world's hardest sales job becomes near impossible.
Inside Higher Ed highlighted the latest political ping pong this week, but more importantly, the human cost, as real students who are trying to go to college are being disincentivized right and left due to the "new and improved FAFSA" mandated by a 2020 law.
In our work with colleges, one thing is clear, the systemic resistance to student enrollment keeps getting bigger, meaning the go-to-market strategies of institutions have to get better.
Instagram photos of students on the quad, languid letters from the president, and human interest stories won't do it. Perhaps this FAFSA crisis will bring more institutions to the realization that they must show up to the marketplace in a completely different way, facing sacred cows that have fattened over a very long time.
The bloody and brutal social media <> media divorce
It was not that long ago, in the throws of the last time Trump v Biden filled the headlines, that the most logical place to find the latest news on the topic was your Facebook or Twitter feed.
Media companies had spent a decade making big (and misplaced) bets that the way to save the news business was to trust the oily handshake of Silicon Valley CEOs. Believing that if they gave away their content for free to be repurposed across the internet, somehow this would result in a shared revenue environment that would replace all those print ads in magazines and newspapers no longer rolling off the presses.
Well, we know how this story ends. Meta, Google and the like had no intention of actually paying for news, instead stripping it for parts and fodder for their AI engines.
California is now joining Canada and the EU in requiring Big Tech to pay for what they stole. Google is retaliating by pulling all news from its search in California. Meta has deprecated news in all of its platform feeds.
Eventually, consumers will learn that Big Tech never delivered news, only gossip at scale that looked like news, and will find it elsewhere. In the mean time, the open spaces will be filled with generative AI "synthetic information" and neo-Nazis on Twitter/X.
Now where can I buy a newspaper?
Alex Koller
Conclusion
If you've made it this far, Kudos to you! Finishing newsletters is niche skill set, worthy of its place on your next resume or LinkedIn update.
But making it this far also means one thing: you're getting value here. Our disruptive tendencies are seeping into your brain, and you believe that a better, more trust-focused way of showing up in the marketplace is possible.
You can help us get this message out by copying the URL in your browser right now and sending it to a friend or posting it to your favorite Slack channel.
Cause when we think better, we do better.
Forward, forward.
