You would be foolish not to research a market that you wanted to target. As twentysomethings we feel we have some instinctive understanding of young people. However that is never going to be enough and we have hired some real experts to help us gauge the nature of the online teen market.
The hired hands are a specialist "youth" research agency that has considerable experience in working with online services and with parents. If you think their work is child's play - think again. Their consultants toy with 1,000-people surveys and explore the fuzzy responses of focus groups.
The work has been fantastically useful. The focus groups have provided valuable ideas for how the site should be laid out and how users would like to navigate through it. It has helped us develop a final site that should appeal both to boys and girls. This sounds easy, but it is not - one red-themed page was highly rated by 90% of girls but disliked by a similar proportion of boys.
You inevitably receive some results from the research that you could have predicted beforehand. Would anyone be surprised to know that "MP3", "sex" and "Britney Spears" are some of the most popular online search terms with teenage boys? Results such as these do make you wonder whether you are getting real value from the work.
However, you do gain some real insights into how the teenage experience is changing. Mobile phones, for example, are popular with teenagers, and now account for 20% of a typical young person's monthly expenditure. Young people are also becoming more aware of online services, at least partly as a result of continued television advertising. More than two-thirds of young people are keen to buy online, even though a significant proportion still see it as a bit of a novelty.
Perhaps the most interesting piece of research still lies ahead of us. The extended team, including a number of our key agencies, is participating in a day of "teenzifying" activity. The idea is to immerse ourselves for a short time in the lifestyle of today's teenagers. The day includes such delights as a shopping trip to the local high street and a video diary by a teenager. We are drawing the line at buying skateboards.
But market research does not come cheap. With the research we expect to do over a full 12 months we could have hired two extra members of staff.
Luckily, going forward, there are other more cost effective ways of researching the market. In particular, when rools is launched we will have customers and using the service and interacting with the site. We will then be able to capture valuable information about their activities, such as which parts of the site are visited most frequently, directly. We'll also be able to ask customers for feedback. This will be a real help, particularly in a market that is notoriously fickle and fast moving.
Adam Hamdy and Guy Mallison are the co-founders of rools.com, a service that lets teenagers buy online without a credit card
