Personal Update + Don’t Market to Youth. BE Youth.
[Editor’s Note: This post originally featured a Viddler video that is no longer available due to the platform’s shutdown.]
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
Personal Update
I have been crazy busy with the Viralogy.com launch and traveling to LA lately. That explains why I haven’t been able to update my blog as often. That’s why I am starting to Vlog more now. It is not as good for SEO because there is very little text, but at least I keep you guys engaged :)
Viralogy has been incredibly successful though. We just launched 4 weeks ago, and we already have unique visitors in the mid five-digits, with 30% of that from direct traffic. That means people are recognizing our brand and going back to our site. I’ve also been meeting people who have heard about us at almost every single event I went to, so that’s a good sign too.
I think at this point we are still very far away from success, but we have already built a small plane, went through the runway, and took off. We’ll need better planes and better pilots to make sure we get to our destination, but we’re at a good start. Right now our company of 10 has been extraordinary, and my job is to make sure it stays that way :)
Lesson in the Video
If you want to market to teens, you can’t rely on market data and research. You have to be there where the teens are. Play their games, join their chat rooms, hang out with them. That’s the only way you can understand what they really like.
That’s like trying to buy a present for a kid. If you just have tons of research about the kid’s demographic, chances are you won’t buy a birthday present for a kid that he loves. BUT if you were his uncle that plays with him often, you have a very good chance to buy that birthday present that he loves.
Be that uncle, not a marketer.