

Guy Kawasaki: Will anyone pay for anything? - cwan
https://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/the-world/article/will-anyone-pay-for-anything-guy-kawasaki

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idlewords
Panel discussion with high school and college kids reveals shocking truth -
young people tend to be broke.

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TomOfTTB
From my own experience it's a "Time and Effort" vs "Money" thing. When I was
young I was willing to put up with broken torrent connections, annoying ads,
and other inconveniences in order to get stuff for free. Because I had more
time than money and was willing to put in the effort.

As an adult I'd just assume pay the $1.99 or buy the $36 (a year) Pandora One
membership so as to not have to put up with that stuff. Because now I have the
money but there is much more of a demand on my time.

In that way I think these young kids aren't going to spend money they don't
have now. But once they have enough money for media costs to be
inconsequential they'll start paying for stuff.

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barrkel
Please forgive the extremely rude nitpicking: assume -> as soon

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TomOfTTB
If you don't nitpick how will I learn? :)

Seriously though I do that on occasion and it always amazes me. It's like the
motor part of my brain is completely separate from the creative part and so on
occasion I'll type the completely wrong word because my fingers are somehow
blindly transcribing what my inner monologue is saying. It's weird.

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JacobAldridge
Nice little lessons for anyone who wants to sell to 'young' people.

I'll call out this point, however: "they never buy anything because of the
advertising."

I've heard this before in market research groups, and even from business
owners, but let me tell you - if you're buying some product, anything with a
brand, chances are that advertising played some role.

See also this recent HN discussion -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690758>

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billswift
Advertising serves two related but distinct purposes:

1) Trying to get immediate sales, as part of selling a good;

2) More important is marketing - building longer term awareness of brands,
quality, and availability of goods.

When people downplay the effectiveness of advertising they are almost always
thinking of its effectiveness at selling, where its major benefit to a company
is through marketing.

~~~
JacobAldridge
Could hardly agree with you more Bill. I actually go as far as giving
different names to the two purposes, and putting them into completely
different areas of the business.

1) is 'Marketing' is Operations, it's about revenue today, and sits with
Sales, product delivery etc.

2) is 'Positioning' (from the work by Jack Trout) is equity management, is
about future revenue and sits with things like vision, culture, new product
research etc.

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justin_vanw
No, students won't pay for anything -- because they can't. They might spin
this, but they aren't riding a half broken down 94 Chevy Lumina because they
hate BMWs. Most college students are earning well into negative territory,
taking loans to pay basic expenses.

At some point you make money at a rate that you can pay your bills and some is
left over. Suddenly it's not economical for you to spend 14 hours a week
roaming around trying to score free wifi. When you are older, time is the most
limited resource, not money. Suddenly there aren't enough hours in the day to
do what you want to do, and you will pay for things that let you do things you
want to do.

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Goladus
_Can it be that email is the killer app of social media?_

This should not surprise anyone. It would seem to me that few people would
miss the irony involved when you get a message telling you that you have a
message.

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krschultz
Businesses will. Older more affluent customers will.

Too many startup founders aim for their own age group. I feel like the term
"target market" never caught on in Silicon Valley. Not many companies start
out chasing the 14-21 demographic unless you want to lock in a brand
preference for later (i.e. Abercrombie). 21-49 is a lot better, affluent is a
lot better, enterprise or b2b is a lot better, yet for some reason the
competition is at the bottom because that is what founders know. Find the
problems elsewhere and you will be much safer.

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joshfinnie
I think this makes broad strokes using a finite subset of people. Of course
they won't pay for facebook if they had to, imagine asking your parents for
your $39 yearly membership to facebook...

I do enjoy what I get for free, but if push comes to shove I don't see myself
leaving gmail no matter what the final yearly cost is.

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csomar
I always say "if i has the money I'll buy even if I don't need". That time i
don't have even a paypal with null balance; now I have the money and even a
CC, I still don't buy anything, unless it will convert to more money!

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chanux
That kind of sounds like "It's better to improve than invent"?

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access_denied
And Gmail stands out as the one web-app that the kids love. Woot, they love
the one innovative web-app that really improved something? Unbelievable.

~~~
dkersten
Everyone I know uses gmail for the same reasons I use gmail: it has a nice
itnerface, is easy to use, has plenty of useful additional features, rarely
goes down, provides loads of space so I don't need to worry about deleting
stuff that I _might_ want later, its spam filter works well and ... its free.
Being free is the main thing though, because google could drop one or more of
their other features and I'd still use it, but force me to pay and I'd look
elsewhere. Why? Because I can.

Not that I'm not willing to pay for a good service - I am (and do), but I need
a lot of additional value over what I can get for free. Gmail gives me a lot
of value, but I have yet to be convinced that its enough to pay for.

~~~
enjo
Value is the right word. I wouldn't pay for gmail (even though I LOVE it),
because it's one small part of my larger internet existence.

In a vacuum, I might pay for gmail. The problem is tied up in the fact that I
also use 10-15 other services (twitter, facebook, etc...) that I might also
have to pay for. If I could consolidate all of those into one place and pay
just one bill, well then I might be tempted to pay.

The fragmented nature of the web itself makes monetization difficult.

