Brands College Students Love

The survey holds a few surprises. For example, here in the Northeast, it’s hard to believe that the Yankees come in number 1 among this age group, with the Red Sox behind (and I’m not a sports fan!).

Then again, there are some findings to which I said, “Duh.” Like the one about Apple, which clearly done a lot right in product development and marketing. It’s very popular:

It ranked as the No. 2 overall best brand by 17% of the students; ranked Nos. 1 and 2 as most anticipated products with iPhone and new iPod versions; ranked Nos. 1 and 2 in product recommendations with iPod followed by Apple products in general; and ranked No. 6 in most popular commercials.

Also of interest is this nugget about social networking:

While Facebook ranked as the most popular website among this demographic, social networking is twice as popular with young women as young men. MySpace, which was No. 1 last year, ranked No. 2 with females but dropped out of the top five for young men. That means marketers using social-networking sites to target young people are reaching far more females than males.

“The gender differences here are significant,” said Jesse Chen, lead consultant for Anderson’s GenX2Z youth-research group. “It’s the opposite of what we see when looking at use of social-networking sites for business purposes among adults, where men are far more likely to use sites such as LinkedIn. Among this younger demographic, it’s the women who are the über networkers.” Which also raises an interesting question: As these women age, will they change the networking dynamic between women and men in the future? And will new LinkedIn-type competitors rush to fill that need?

Tom Anderson, managing partner Anderson Analytics, offered anecdotal evidence of his own LinkedIn list of 800 with many more men than women. “We’ve seen older adult women tend to be more careful with networking and sharing information. Obviously, that’s not the case for younger women,” he said. “As these women age, I think the disparity will go away. ... The question is what kind of choices will be available for them?”

While this generation consumes a lot of online content, they don’t produce much themselves: 64% don’t make videos at all and 14% make them but don’t share them. Only 8% reported uploading videos to YouTube. And only 14% write their own blogs.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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