The youth market is a key audience for most brands – after all, they are the consumers of tomorrow. However, they require a deeper understanding. Their attitudes towards sustainability, their purchase behaviours, and their media consumption habits appear to be markedly different to previous generations. More than anything else, young people value authenticity – so brands need to understand their relevance to them and how they fit in with their behaviours, motivations, attitudes, and needs.
Why are Gen Z important?
We know that Gen Z behave differently online and that there’s a need to change the way we engage with them. Our State of the Youth Nation data provides evidence of this:
- 93% of Gen Z own a smartphone, while only 29% own a PC – down from 33% in 2016.
- 23% of Gen Z play on gaming apps on their mobile phones at least once a day – up from 14% in 2015.
The challenge is how to engage with Gen Z. It’s increasingly difficult to engage young people online with surveys. Gone are the days when people were invited to surveys via email and took them on desktops or laptops. We live in a mobile world, where smartphones are the mainstay on how we remain connected. As a research supplier, we need to ensure that our online recruitment methods make it as easy as possible to take surveys, so we can continue accessing niche and valuable audiences for brands and agencies.
Delivering a new app-based experience:
That’s why Savanta are putting Gen Z survey needs first, ensuring they have the best possible experience that aligns to how they interact with technology. Our approach will give you access to better quality data by keeping our panel more engaged and coming back to take more surveys.
Using our in-house panel technology platform, we’ve developed and rolled out an innovative new panel app, YourVue, which provides a much more engaging digital experience. It’s designed to reflect and support how young people operate and opens up huge opportunities to better understand Gen Z.
Key benefits:
YourVue ensures that we won’t just be able to get their answers to your questions, but we can target them more accurately through profiling, and append more data to their profiles. This can also include views on different brands from BrandVue or information about their mobile activity and locations.
And the benefits of YourVue are clear:
- In just six months, Savanta’s proprietary app panel ‘YourVue‘ has grown by 800% since its beta test launch in January 2024.
- Average response rates on YourVue is higher than industry average by over 25%.
- One in eight of every one of Savanta’s survey completes now comes from YourVue.
By developing the app on our own proprietary panel technology and continually introducing Q&A tools to address panel fraud, we’ve reduced our quality removal rate to less than 10%.
The app’s functionality also makes it much harder for ‘professional’ survey takers and fake respondents to successfully ‘complete’ a poll – tackling a challenge that the whole market research industry suffers from.
The leading youth panel:
Savanta is committed to investing more and growing our Youth panel. Our aim is to provide the industry with a highly engaged audience of young people, enabling our clients to understand their trends, attitudes, and behaviors. We want it to remain the leading youth panel within the market research industry.
Given the importance of this audience, the value to our business, and our investment in it – we need to nurture and protect it. That’s why we’re putting security measures in place to ensure they have the best possible survey experience. We want them to use our survey platform, where we can better control and deliver their experience and ensure it’s a positive one.
Data quality and fraud prevention:
The research industry is facing serious challenges with fraudulent respondents and increasingly sophisticated bots. Here at Savanta, we’ve updated and evolved our data quality checks to identify and weed out rogue respondents. The controls put in place are complex and ensure we continue to provide the highest quality data and samples for our clients.
Savanta’s unique strengths:
At Savanta, our unique ability to access hard-to-reach audiences, such as millionaires, MPs, Gen-Z, and Millennials, sets us apart. This skill is a key reason for our acquisition of YouthSight, an agency renowned for its expertise in engaging young people, which aligns seamlessly with our strategy and vision.