The Fountain of Youth Spending
As Business 2.0 points out, it's a scary thought: the "most promising new frontier" for the wireless industry is now the youth market. Certainly, people in the industry have talked about the youth market as an opportunity for years. However, focusing in on youth as your savior is a dangerous game. Certainly both carriers and handset makers are trying to come up with ways to entice younger users with cooler phones and more reasonable plans. The article mentions, of course, Virgin Mobile's plans for the US market. It also talks about market research companies like the folks at Wildseed, spending all their time shadowing kids so they know what they really want in their mobile phones. In the end, though, kids are known to follow completely unexpected fads - and while they fall for marketing hype, they're also skeptical of anything that appears to be marketing hype - making the process even more difficult.
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