Participatory Marketing Network Study Says Email is Missing the Mark with Gen Y
New Study Shows Gen Y welcomes direct brand interactions through email, but they expect more relevance and greater ability to control, organize and manage the interactions

NEW YORK (March 11, 2009) — The Participatory Marketing Network (PMN), an organization dedicated to helping marketers transition from push and permission marketing to participatory marketing, today announced the results of a new study showing that marketing emails aren’t relevant to Generation Y. The majority of Gen Y consumers do welcome direct brand interactions through email, but they want more ability to control, organize and manage the interactions. PMN conducted the study in February 2009 with its research partner, the Lubin School of Business' Interactive and Direct Marketing (IDM) Lab at Pace University, by questioning 220 PMN panel members and consumers between the ages of 18-24.

“While online marketing continues to evolve, traditional email communications from marketers have remained surprisingly stagnant,” said Michael Della Penna, co-founder and Executive Chairman “For email to remain relevant for today’s ‘iPhone generation,’ brands must introduce new thinking and innovative features that give users more control and allow them to participate in a mutually beneficial relationship with them.”

Findings from PMN’s Gen Y research, administered to the exclusive Gen Y panel at the Lubin School’s IDM Lab, include:

• Marketing email is less relevant Gen Y consumers – only 28 percent of those surveyed believe the email they get from companies is relevant
• Gen Y consumers are eager to see “innovative services” that allow them to better control, organization and manage email coming from brands. Specifically,
• 78 percent would like their email client to automatically categorize and delete expired promotional messages
• 62 percent would like communicate directly with retailers about their favorite products in exchange for getting the best prices from them
• 44 percent say they’d subscribe to an email service that collected and summarized multiple offers of interest to them
• 32 percent say they’d share promotional email offers with members inside a social network and open emails from others
• More than half of Gen Y consumers (51 percent) say they’d join a separate social network dedicated to managing brand interactions

The Participatory Marketing Network partners with Pace University’s Lubin School of Business' Interactive and Direct Marketing Lab to provide its members with exclusive access to a Generation Y panel for ongoing research initiatives. Members can design and execute proprietary quantitative and qualitative research in conjunction with the PMN to better understand and market to this powerful consumer segment. The broad definition of Generation Y includes more than 70 million Americans born between 1977 and 2002.

The PMN was recently launched to help marketers navigate change as consumers increasingly turn to each other for insight and information rather than brands. It helps marketers make the transition from push and permission marketing to participatory marketing – which is all about taking advantage of the social Web. The Network’s mission is to help educate marketers about how to market WITH customers rather than AT them. It will focus on the strategies and tactics that exemplify this kind of thinking and, most important, it will demonstrate why participatory marketing is so powerful by spotlighting brands that are already “doing it right.”

The Interactive & Direct Marketing (IDM ) Lab at the Lubin School of Business (www.pace.edu/lubin) at Pace University is a student run direct and interactive marketing agency that works with its roster of clients on traditional interactive integrated marketing situations and new media solutions. It is a formal practicum, headed by its founder Professor of Marketing Harvey Markovitz (hmarkovitz@pace.edu) who has been a direct marketing professional since 1968 holding an MS in Interactive Marketing (NYU) and by Professor of Marketing Vishal Lala, PhD,(vlala@pace.edu) who is an expert in data base marketing, consumer response modeling and consumer behavior.

For more information about the Participatory Marketing Network, to inquire about membership, or for more information about the Generation Y and Social Networks study, please go to http://www.thepmn.org or email info@thepmn.org.

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