As our world becomes more diverse due to intertwining cultures and the idea of individuality finally being embraced much more compared to a decade ago, consumers have been harder to place under black and white demographics of old. A casual conversation about a friend’s favourite music genre can go so many ways as you hear words like ‘post-grunge’ or ‘electro-pop’ or ‘rock-trance’. Even movies nowadays can be argued to be made for adults, or kids, or mid-20s, or 90’s kids. This has become an increasing difficult headache for marketers who some still live in the days where society could have been easily divided to just 3 to 4 different groups.
I found this particularly interesting as I browsed through YouTube videos. Because YouTube is known as giving the power back to the layman to create media how they want it and to whom they want it to reach out to, its interesting how different ‘YouTubers’ target different demographics or consumers. The number one most subscribed YouTuber at the moment is PewDiePie, who zooms in on the gamers market with his video game walkthroughs and reviews and sets himself apart from other similar YouTubers by making his videos hilariously entertaining rather than just being a good gamer. There’s also YouTubers like WongFu who does high scaled short films which ranges from comedy to emotional plot lines.
There are various other genres on YouTube from news channels all the way to just weekly vlogs. Most of the notable YouTubers treat it as a profitable job, and in order to do that, they would have to treat every video as a company would a product. They have to analyze and review all their viewer statistics down to the smallest of details. An analysis of their viewership would include which videos gain most popularity, which days and times during the day that they get the most traffic, and even which ‘hot spots’ in their videos get replayed the most times (Karch, n.d).
An analysis was done by a blogger (WordPress, 2014) on how PewDiePie rose to become the most subscribed YouTuber, and one of the key points made was that PewDiePie is frequently in tune with his audience as he listens to feedback and recommendations. As the world slowly becomes more diverse and individuality is encouraged at every corner, it really is difficult to produce products that makes everybody happy. Perhaps only in a medium like YouTube where content is uploaded by everyone and for everyone at a rate – that would have been incomprehensible at the time the first book on ‘consumer research’ was written – can society’s celebration of individuality be satisfied, and even a quick look at the negative comments on a single video would beg you to differ.
References
Karch M, n.d, ‘How to find out who is watching your YouTube videos’, About.com, http://google.about.com/od/googleblogging/qt/YouTubeInsightQ.htm
Matthew, 2014, ‘3 Content market strategies PewDiePie uses to dominate YouTube’, WordPress.com, http://blog.rgbsocial.com/2014/02/17/3-content-marketing-strategies-pewdiepie-uses-to-dominate-youtube/
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