Instant Grass got interviewed by Quirk E-Marketing…on youth culture… check it here…

by Alexandra Rees (Quirk)

In this day and age, it’s pretty difficult to put your finger on what’s cool. At the recentGeneration Next Awards Survey, Coca Cola came top of the log for Overall Coolest Global Brand for the second year running. We all love the red and white giant (all together now, brrrrrrrrrrrr!), but what exactly is it about this brand that makes it so inestimably cool, such an undeniable part of youth culture? The only individuals who can answer that question are the Puma-wearing, Coca Cola-drinking bouncers at Club Cool: the youth themselves. Cue the role of youth collaboration agencies such as Cape Town’s Instant Grass International.

Greg Potteron, Co-Founder and International Planner for Instant Grass.

Born out of a need for honest, usable and real-time insight into the youth market, Instant Grass uses a network of some of the country’s most connected and opinionated young people to “place the consumer at the centre of every step of a product, brand or business life cycle”. So says Greg Potterton, the agency’s Co-Founder and International Planner. Deeming quantitative research too slow and qualitative methods too “canned”, Instant Grass spotted a gap for developing a new insight extraction model that would enable marketers to experience the happenings of the youth market in real-time. The idea, Greg says, was that this collaboration would also enable the development of new product innovations – and the methodology has been a success for brands such as Huggies,Rehidrat and Lipton Ice Tea. We picked our top three key insights from the interview:

Instant Grass collaborates 24/7 with a network of influential young people. How do you identify the ideal grass – what would one have to do to prove one’s “grass-worthiness”?

We have a core network that we have grown over seven years. We use this network to connect us with potential new “grasses”. These prospects go through a series of face-to-face interviews and are then profiled against an algorithm that we developed with theUniversity of Cape Town and TNS Research Surveys. All prospect grasses are put on a three-month trial period. Essentially we are looking for highly connected and highly opinionated early- adopters.

In your opinion, what are some of the challenges when marketing to a youth audience and how is a youth collaboration agency such as Instant Grass well-placed to crack the tough nut that is the youth market?

You need to earn credibility. The only way to do this is to participate in the lives and conversations of the market. Only once you have established credibility and traction can you begin to interact. 

A collaborative agency is a conduit between the boardroom and the youth market. Our currency is our network of young opinionated South Africans. We represent the youth market and by proxy we are the youth market. 

It’s been said that ideas are the new currency and that digital is the new marketplace. To what extent do you think this is true and have you noticed more clients wanting to include digital in their marketing strategies or more digitally-focused insights from grasses?

The Web is “writable” and for the first time the consumer has control over the content. Digital is the first time in modern history where we have a channel that offers both communities and broadcast. The Web is like a radio with a built in broadcaster. The consumer is now in control. The youth market does not distinguish between on and off-line and all our campaigns include both. Word-of-mouth needs to be the objective and not the channel.

The fundamentals have remained the same throughout the years; however, digital has enabled a new momentum and reach to the discipline. Instant Seed runs as a separate business from Instant Grass – it is a word-of-mouth channel wherein we develop both analogue and digital strategies with the intention of creating viral word-of-mouth.

2010/06/14