In this day and age, it’s pretty difficult to put your finger on what’s cool. At the recent Generation 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 the University 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.
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Instant Grass is a scam. They trick people into working for them for free. Firstly, most of their 'grasses' are not early adopters but just anyone who think they're early adopters (and have their ego's stroked by IG ofcourse). They take everyone who applies to be a Grass. During your '3 month trial' you are sent briefs daily and are expected to fill them in, take photos, etc for free. It takes up a lot of time. Once you've reached Grass status (they officially accept you into their network), you still get sent briefs but they suddenly dry up- you will get them once a month. So while you're on your 'trial period' you think you'll be making loads of money as you get so many briefs but as soon as you expect to be paid for the briefs, they hardly send you any briefs. They then accuse you of being lazy but how can you be lazy when you get no work to do? How can they have so many "lazy" individuals who made it through their intensive 3 month trial?
So basically their business model is to get new Grasses every 3 months, make you work for free and when Grasses expect to be paid, they dump you from their system. So when businesses are paying them, all of it goes into their pockets and nothing to the people who actually do the hard work for them. Also, they pride themselves on having a network of early adopters when they really accept anyone (lets have some references who they've worked with at UCT and TNS). Another thing is that they are not organised, they waste so much of your time, they use all your contacts and they can hardly write properly. Who would want to work for them and who would want to work with them? I hope they clean up their act.
Posted by Dean on 2010/09/03