Teenage kicks

Filter Group consultant Ian Stewart - getting ahead of the latest trends for Asian youth

However, popular thinking and experience strongly suggest that these approaches simply don’t work today. Modern teens inhabit an ever-changing world of fads and fashions, where trends are often marketing and media-led.

So could understanding how today’s teens function in such an information-heavy environment lead to them being engaged more productively in the classroom? Somebody who may have insight into this issue is Ian Stewart, CEO and co-founder of media consultancy The Filter Group.

For nearly 14 years, Ian has advised major companies such as Coca Cola and Nokia on trends affecting Asian youth and how they might use them to target their products at particular groups.

In a sense, he is part-marketing man, part-psychologist and part-clairvoyant, running research projects into next year's fashions and predicting how they will affect attitudes and, of course, the sales potential of consumer goods.

Ian is also a part-time lecturer at Bangkok University where he teaches marketing to fourth-year students, sometimes using them as a litmus test for his latest campaigns.

“We define youth as being somebody under 20,” he says. “For research purposes, we focus on the age group between 18 and 24 — those who are technically not kids or teenagers but are still youthful. They tend to be the oldest kids at school, freshmen at university or just starting work.

"Anybody under 18 will ultimately aspire to what they see in that age group. When you’re older than them, you tend to look downwards to that group for trend inspiration as well,” Ian says.

MOVERS AND SHAKERS

People usually look back to the golden age of early adulthood as a time of emerging freedom and experimentation. It is an age where many of us form our core opinions and attitudes, most of which we carry with us for the rest of our adult lives.

In the past, marketing professionals would often choose a particular age group and simply target them as one homogenous mass. Stewart believes such a technique has little effect in today’s fragmented society, which is why, he says, the Filter Group looks upon youth as being made up of different “tribes” — each tribe follows a particular style of music, fashion and dress, which, in turn, influences an individual’s attitude and opinion.

“Youth are always looking to be different,” he says. “They have the confidence to stand up and stand out from the crowd and the curiosity to seek something new and different. In a place like Japan, they probably have a thousand tribes.”

Japanese youth culture is of particular interest to people like Stewart because it is usually at the forefront of the region’s latest trends and fashions. According to research, Japanese youth take their lead from youth cultures in other countries and then add a particular Asian flavour.

Fashion influenced by the British punk scene in the late 1970s, for example, has now infiltrated certain sections of Japanese youth culture, but without the blatant aggression — a mode of behaviour that would look out of place there.

Thai youth, along with their peers in other neighbouring countries, are what Stewart calls “Japan watchers” in so far as Japan has a major influence on their passions and trends, even more so than influences from the West.

“Thailand is very receptive to outside cultures, very forward looking — a lot of what they do locally and culturally comes from other places,” he says. “So many trends starts with music. When you embrace music, you start to explore how that music is represented — the style and the look. It then gets followed by fashion, followed by lifestyle, mentality and outlook.”

One of the biggest trends among Bangkok youth currently is the indie music and arts scene. Its followers even have their own name — dek naew — and they mark themselves out by being distinctive rather than wearing designer clothes or sporting brand-name accessories.

The emphasis here is very much on being individual and a naew’s raffish appearance brings with it an air of cool sophistication and cultured charm. The trend is already spreading outwards from its Siam Square base and looks set to become more than just a niche. That is until it becomes too popular and something else comes along to replace it.

“The concept of niche has become massive,” says Stewart. “Those small niches are much bigger groups now. Even so, you’re still going to have the mass, whether they are kids, teens or adults. They think about other things — they’re not too interested in music and fashion and sport.”

TRENDS IN THE CLASSROOM

It would be naïve to think that teenagers do not bring their passions and attitudes with them into the classroom. Just as adults adjust their behaviour when in a professional environment, young people adapt too and don’t simply leave their personalities outside the door.

Stewart believes this is a fact that educators should embrace. “I think there’s a very heavy curriculum-based learning style here so perhaps that doesn’t lends itself to a lot of creativity in teaching,” he says. “Introducing street relevance and talking in their language might improve things.”

But there are other, perhaps more significant ways in which popular trends affect a young person’s education, not least in the way they take in and process information.

“I think there’s absolutely a paradigm that youth have learned to cope with the massive amounts of information that are around us all, particularly for anyone under 10 because that is the world they’ve grown up in,” says Stewart.

“It’s a world of so many more TV channels, radio stations, so many more magazines and newspapers. And now you’ve got the Internet with thousands and millions of websites as well as mobile phones and SMS. Youth, particularly, embrace that sort of thing.”

Indeed, we are all having to cope with the information overload that came with the dawn of the 21st century, but Stewart says that young people already have the mechanisms in place for processing all that information effectively.

“What people in their 30s would see as a chore to get through and people in their 50s don’t even try, people in their teens are fully excited about the fact that there may be 20,000 websites on their favourite topic,” he says.

If kids are now able to process information so fast, the phenomenon may explain what is widely perceived as a lower attention span among the current generation of youngsters.

“The more that kids are whizzing around the Internet, surfing 60 or more TV stations and quickly reading their SMSs means that sitting in a cinema for two hours is, I think, going to become harder and harder for kids, especially if they are watching DVDs at home and they’re stop-starting them and doing their own thing,” he says.

“I guess you could say the implication for education is that sitting in a lecture hall doing the same thing for an hour probably won’t work in the same way as it did when we were kids. I think now you have to break classes up, have lots of activities and change things around.”

No doubt traditionalists will be reeling at the thought of this, but it is, nonetheless, an emerging reality facing today’s teachers. Many have already begun to shift their perspective by introducing technology, where possible, into their lessons and breaking them up into bite-sized chunks.

The Filter Group is now in the process of researching how young people make decisions about further education, particularly those who choose to study abroad. Following their research, Ian and his colleagues expect to advise on an integrated approach whereby students can combine both international and local study, rather than spending all their time — and money — either in Thailand or overseas.

Ian hopes that in the future his company will be called upon to advise on wider educational matters. In the meantime, he suggests that teacher-student communication and teaching styles need to be revised, given the changing way that young people interact with media and new interactive mediums like computer games and the Internet.

“The biggest thing is not assuming that we as marketing managers or anybody in their 30s or 40s understand what’s going on even if we’ve got kids or even if we think we’re youthful,” he says. “You’ve got to talk to your consumer. You’ve got to sit down with young people and understand what they are thinking and what they are following. Educators need to do that too — they need to research the kids!”