So you think you understand how to market to Gen Y. Perhaps you’ve run some focus groups and and subscribed to one of those great trend reports.

If so, you may be privy to eye-opening information such as: their favorite brand is Apple, they don’t trust advertising, and they really like brands who do something positive for the environment. Profound.

Well, as this New York Times article illustrates, there’s a strong possibility that you don’t know sh!t. Here’s a little sample, just an example…

The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.

“Why does this matter?” you ask. Because if you’re going to sell to them, you need to understand them as people.

On a basic level, your demographics are skewed. Income levels have different meanings if someone lives at home. And if they’re not saving for a wedding, they have opportunities to do different things with their money.

But it goes so much deeper than that. These people live differently than you, which means they think differently than you, or than what you’re used to. They have different ideals, priorities, values. And the things that motivate them to spend with you are probably not immediately apparent. You might think that the cool Facebook app is enough to be down with the kids, but lasting success depends on developing an intimate understanding of who your customers really are.

How to do that is a topic for another post. If you’re serious about, we can help you. For now, let’s just say it may mean getting out from behind your desk and doing a little real work out in the field. Are you ready?

Would you drink this wine?

Wine snobs may want to skip this post.

For the rest of you, a question: Does packaging matter for the wines you buy? Is it all about the Parker score? A friend’s recommendation? A sommelier’s suggestion?

For most people, package design is important. It catches our attention, communicates positioning, attracts or repels us. I’m not telling you anything here. But somehow, the wine business has largely been immune to innovations in design. There are literally tens of thousands of French, Italian, and German bottles that look almost exactly alike. In the U.S., we have more than 5,000 domestic producers, most of whom choose — as if from a catalog — between classic, down-to-earth, or contemporary label looks.

Don’t believe me? Perhaps you can think of your favorite wine that has an interesting label —the black-on-black one that just seems really cool. Take a stroll down the wine aisle in a grocery store. It’s a sea of sameness that always leaves me wondering how they sell any wine at all.

Anyhow, the good people at thecoolist.com have managed to come up with a selection of really good, innovative wine packages. They don’t all appeal to me — I don’t see myself drinking wine out of an oil can anytime soon. But that’s the point of good packaging, isn’t it? Help people find you and decide whether or not to buy you.

What about you? What are your favorites on this list? Or do you have another great wine label to share? Let’s see it.

Print is dead.

What that really means is that the old print magazine business is dead. You remember: Print a ton of copies and stack them high on magazine stands. Try to sell half of them (a sell-through rate of 50% was considered great) for dirt cheap (12 issues for only $10!). Fill each copy with no fewer than seven (7) subscription cards, some bound in and some loose so they would fall out onto the floor to beg the reader’s attention. Oh, and don’t forget the big celebrity photo on the cover, with another big celebrity in a bubble near the top. And use orange (or some other color du jour) on the cover. And the single-copy price has to end in $.95. Those are scientifically proven to increase circulation.

Yeah, that business is dead.

You know what isn’t dead? Making a great product for an audience who cares and charging money for it.

The guys at Monocle get this. The British magazine blends crosses several different categories, as the site describes: “a global briefing covering international affairs, business, culture and design.”

It’s well written and well designed. And the content is interesting. But Monocle is much more than that. There are shops in London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Hong Kong that sell exclusive products from small home furnishings to bikes and clothing. There are events available only to subscribers.

In other words, there’s a complete brand experience.

The best part: a year’s subscription is $117 (75 pounds). They’re not begging you to pick them up with two issues FREE! They’re making a good product and charging real money for it.

That may not be the future of print, but it may be the future of business.

These guys get it. Not only do they make great products, but they understand there’s nothing like making the kids giggle to get the cash register ringing.

Okay, this might be too edgy for some brands, but what can you do to make people laugh and maybe think you’re kinda clever? Post a comment here or let us know if you need help thinking of something.

Rebel needs a community manager. If you love social media and can be engaging and persuasive in both English and French, we want you down with the team.

Extra credit if you love cars and / or have experience with automotive marketing.

This is a contract position. We don’t care where you live. Just be smart, reliable, and organized, and able to work independently.

You can apply here: http://bit.ly/workatrebel

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Disclaimer: This post may not be all that helpful.

I just need to vent. I’ve just come from the YouTube page for the United States Treasury, which features a “viral” video for the new $5 bill, as well as an unveiling of the new $100.

The $100 spot offers a walkaround as if to show us the features of a new car, while the $5 clip is a little infomercial packed with consumer reactions.

This is complete insanity. Why would anyone feel the need to market money? And where did they get the money to market money? Who approved this? There’s a long list of people who need to be fired immediately.

My guess is this is a case of someone taking the job a little too seriously and paying too much attention to all of the hype around social media. Sure, over 800,000 people watched the Ben Franklin video, but so what? Most of those people don’t have jobs, and won’t be getting their hands on a bill anytime soon. And even if they do, so what?

It seems obvious to me that money has no intrinsic value. That is, it doesn’t matter how nice the bill is, or how much it costs to print. The only thing that matters is what I can buy with it. Am I missing something? Is there some conceivable reason why it would be important for me to feel good about the $5 bill in my pocket, other than the fact that I can take it out of my pocket to buy a Hot Pocket? Or something else cheap that rhymes with pocket?

Someone please tell me why this makes sense. I would have written them directly, but of course comments have been disabled on the page.

Twitter helps you get it right

As Mashable explains in “How Twitter’s New Media Blog Aims To Teach By Example,” Twitter is taking a pro-active role in teaching users how to make the most out of their service.

For all the folks out there — haters and otherwise — who continue to question the validity of Twitter as a communication medium, y’all need to pay attention.

media.twitter.com isn’t just a blog. It’s an important step forward in the evolution of technology-based communication.

MySpace started us off on the wrong foot by building a massive audience and not knowing quite what to do with it themselves. Let’s assume they did their best to learn on the fly how to turn their website into a marketing platform, and as it goes with trial and error, success was very hit or miss (with lots of emphasis on “miss”). Most importantly, in typical old-media fashion, the assistance they provided was for serious advertisers only and it involved swarms of sales support teams and conference calls to help you figure out what to do to reach their crowd.

Then Facebook came along, with its brashness and anti-corporate attitude. Kind of like, “we don’t care, you figure it out.” It’s taken years for them to come around, and even now most of their assistance is human-based. And it’s mostly around advertising programs, rather than community building.

So now here’s Twitter, putting it all out there on a blog for anyone to see. Their open style is the way of the future. They’re giving us tips and case studies. It’s almost like they want us to be successful using their service. What a crazy concept!

I’m not arrogant enough to predict where social media is heading, and I’m not here to say it’s going to be all about Twitter. But I am certain that as things continue to get more complicated, the companies who take an active role in creating win-win relationships between marketers and their audiences will have a huge advantage.

This TED Talk is from Eric Giler, CEO of a company called WiTricity, which has developed a technology that will power and charge our electronic devices, wirelessly. This is a company that could change the world.

Think about it. Our phones, computers, gadgets, and cars are increasingly complex and powerful. The one thing that holds them back is power. iPhone’s battery life is terrible. So is MacBook’s. Electric cars may be the future, but they have to be plugged in, which sucks. This limits our mobility, our productivity, and possibly the resulting happiness that comes from things like mobility and productivity.

Where am I going with this?

Imagine if Coke had bought Twitter a couple years back. Its >70 million users would be exposed to Coke branding that many more times than they already are. Think that would be significant for Coke’s business? Damn straight. Now think about Facebook, Foursquare, Google, and the other companies that are changing lives and societies on a daily basis. What if instead of spending billions of dollars to advertise on these networks, major consumer brands spent just a fraction of that amount in early-stage investment capital to fund these companies? Guess what:

1. They’d have a better understanding of consumer behavior
2. They’d make money, possibly lots and lots of money
3. They’d earn the goodwill of being positioned as forward-thinking and innovative
4. They’d have countless opportunities for integration and cross-promotion

Back when I started the Rebel Organization, the premise was that major corporate money should go to investing in culture. The vision was that brands could fund records, create works of art, invest in movies. Instead of waiting for an act to become huge and then spend for a tour sponsorship that nobody cares about, put the money in early to support artist development and have a fan for life in the artist, and that artist will tell all of his fans.

We were somewhat successful in that endeavor, but we’ve never brought it to the scale it deserves.

Russell Simmons recently called social media “the New Hip Hop.” I agree completely, and that idea is reshaping my vision for a future where in addition to (or instead of) investing in culture, brands should also be investing in social technologies.

Heed my word: smart marketers will gain tremendous advantage over their slower competitors. Which one are you?

Gang Starr frontman GURU died this week. If you don’t know who GURU was, or want the details of his life and death, there’s an excellent piece on that at URB, or The New York Times. This is a marketing blog, and as much as we at Rebel were fans of GURU and are deeply saddened by his loss, our job is to help you become better at your job of marketing your brands and products. We do that by learning from everything — I mean everything — that happens around us, including the untimely deaths of rap stars. Here we go…

By some definitions, Gang Starr never made it big. They never sold records like Lil Wayne or Soulja Boy. They didn’t become actors like Ice Cube or Mos Def. But they did manage to build a career that spanned two decades and brought us some of the most important hip hop records of our time.

In a word, Gang Starr were influencers. That term gets thrown around a lot these days, generally referring to anyone with more than 5 Facebook friends. But Gang Starr epitomized the role of the influencer long before marketing types could ruin the term. They were just really good at what they did. GURU was a good rapper, but his true legacy is about bringing jazz into hip hop in truly innovative ways; it’s about crossing cultural borders by collaborating with artists from around the world; it’s about partnering with one of the best producers in modern music to create records that would endure.

Without trying, they influenced dozens or hundreds of professional musicians to improve, and countless thousands of young kids out there to pick up a mic. And that’s their legacy. Without Gang Starr — and other influential, but not famous artists — maybe there’s no Nas, no Biggie, no Jay-Z. Maybe that’s not the exact lineage, but you get the picture: For every one act who comes out and changes the world, there are several who served to inspire, to influence, to enable them to become who they are.

A major problem with modern society is that the role of the influencer is misunderstood. Surely, the current music business has no room left for artists like GURU or those before them like Rakim or Kool G Rap. The labels won’t support an act with moderate sales over multiple albums. But these are the artists that make wannabe artists want to be artists. These are the ones that matter.

The brand world is largely the same. We’re too busy looking for home runs and superstars to see the real opportunities in solid performers who don’t make the a-list. If you’re a sponsor, you’re far better off supporting artists like Gang Starr who people actually care about than breaking your bank on someone like Lady Gaga who we won’t remember next year. Even if you’re not a sponsor, you should be looking within — and outside — your organization to find the real influencers who inspire you, your team, and your customers. You need to partner with them, win them over, somehow get them on your side.

Think about it: Who influences you? Who inspires you to do what you do even better? Who influences your employees, your customers? And what are you doing to participate in that cycle of influence? Leave a comment here and tell us your story.

Oftentimes I’ll get an email from some company’s list for which the sender’s address is noreply@____.com.

I’m sure there’s an email marketing expert out there who thinks this makes perfect sense. It’s not coming from a person, so don’t pretend it’s coming from a person, and don’t let people think they can reply to the email or they’ll be disappointed. Great reasoning.

Except that I don’t want an email that’s not from a person. There’s a good chance I don’t want an email that is from a person, either, but you telling me that I can’t reply if I want to isn’t going to make me more receptive to your marketing message. Subtly, or perhaps not so subtly, you’re sending me the message that you don’t care about what I have to say, you only care about what you have to say.

And if that’s the case, why would I want to give you my money?