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How Snapchat Built a Business by Confusing Olds

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Re: How Snapchat Built a Business by Confusing Olds

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what is 'olds'? old people? Why would any business grow by confusing them?

Because brand preferences are locked in by the mid 20s, or at least many major brand managers think that.

I think it's far more likely that Snapchat is a very shallow experience. It's common sense that adults wouldn't be the target market. Adults generally prefer richer interactions.

Re: How Snapchat Built a Business by Confusing Olds

#5
post #2

what is 'olds'? old people? Why would any business grow by confusing them?

Compared with Twitter or Facebook, Snapchat can seem almost aggressively user-unfriendly. If you’re new to the app and looking for posts by your kid, your boyfriend, or DJ Khaled, good luck. It’s hard to find somebody without knowing his or her screen name. This is by design. “We’ve made it very hard for parents to embarrass their children,” Spiegel said at a conference in January. “It’s much more for sharing personal moments than it is about this public display.”

It sounds like part of the claim is that the app/platform is intentionally a little clunky and unintuitive so as to prevent an influx of the older generation a la Facebook.

I think. I'm not between 14 and 24 so I don't know the first thing about Snapchat.

Re: How Snapchat Built a Business by Confusing Olds

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Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because brand preferences are locked in by the mid 20s, or at least many major brand managers think that.

I think it's far more likely that Snapchat is a very shallow experience. It's common sense that adults wouldn't be the target market. Adults generally prefer richer interactions.

Adults generally prefer richer interactions.

Any in-depth references that support this? (Strikes me as curious, as I watch my 6-year-old playing a fairly elaborate Minecraft map…)

Re: How Snapchat Built a Business by Confusing Olds

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Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's far more likely that Snapchat is a very shallow experience. It's common sense that adults wouldn't be the target market. Adults generally prefer richer interactions.

Adults generally prefer richer interactions. Any in-depth references that support this? (Strikes me as curious, as I watch my 6-year-old playing a fairly elaborate Minecraft map…)

Maybe I should caveat with "richer social interactions". I also did not claim that users of snap chat were not intelligent or did not enjoy rich experiences. Simply that those who use snap chat enjoy the shallowness of it.

Here is an interesting article that was posted on HN -

http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-te...

Re: How Snapchat Built a Business by Confusing Olds

#9
post #2

what is 'olds'? old people? Why would any business grow by confusing them?

"Olds" is a coy term by "millennials" who wanted the older generations who invented and keep using the term to get a taste of their own medicine.

As far as keeping out "olds", look at what Tinder did by demanding a premium from 30+ users: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/tinder-charging-people-30-t....

Re: How Snapchat Built a Business by Confusing Olds

#10
For the non-believers of Snapchat, here is where I think its value lies:

For the past 50 years brand strategy has largely been (fairly) well characterised. Conventional wisdom in the industry did well enough for brands like McDonald's and Coca Cola to expand across the world and capture generations of customers. This is in part due to an incremental pace of innovation in how customers have consumed media in this time period.

Then came along the internet and a bringing a huge stepwise change, driving not only unprecedented levels of fragmentation/segmentation/individualisation of users but also changing how we interact with and consume media.

The generation of "millennials" and "digital natives" are people who now spend more time on the internet than in front of a TV.

Facebook, with their 1Bn+ daily active users who are known to spend nearly 18 hours a week on the Facebook mobile app, saw the value in Snapchat - younger users don't have a Facebook account. It's uncool, it's creepy with its privacy policies. Snapchat has extremely strong market share on viewership for a generation of users that are arguably the most impressionable/valuable. This same generation don't really watch TV. Considering individual brands would spend hundreds of millions on TV, if Snapchat can capture even a fraction of this media budget, they'll be hugely profitable.

NB I chose McDonald's and Coke as brands as they are two good examples of previously invincible global brands that are now showing significant decline. They also had huge media budgets. For the purposes of my argument, I've chosen to ignore other market trends such as growing health awareness but my point still stands.

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