While middle-aged Gen X’ers and older users approach the Internet as a tool, younger users (teens and Gen Y’ers) see it more as a source of entertainment.  Among users 12-17 years old:

• 78% play online games
• 57% watch videos online
• 69% send instant messages
• 65% use social networking sites
• 59% download music
• 55% have created a profile on a social networking site
• 49% read blogs
• 28% have created their own blog
• 10% visit a virtual world

Access to the full report is here.

These variances are caused by different unconscious motivations that red and blue activate, says [researcher Juliet] Zhu, noting that colour influences cognition and behavior through learned associations.

“Thanks to stop signs, emergency vehicles and teachers’ red pens, we associate red with danger, mistakes and caution,” says Zhu, whose previous research has looked at the impact of ceiling height on consumer choices. “The avoidance motivation, or heightened state, that red activates makes us vigilant and thus helps us perform tasks where careful attention is required to produce a right or wrong answer.”

Conversely, blue encourages us to think outside the box and be creative, says Zhu, noting that the majority of participants believed incorrectly that blue would enhance their performance on all cognitive tasks.

“Through associations with the sky, the ocean and water, most people associate blue with openness, peace and tranquility,” says Zhu, who conducted the research with UBC PhD candidate Ravi Mehta. “The benign cues make people feel safe about being creative and exploratory. Not surprisingly it is people’s favourite colour.”

In a study of more than 600 people, the two researchers tracked performance over a range of tasks that included solving anagrams, designing toys, and assessing marketing.  Not Exactly Rocket Science has a nice summary of one experiment in which subjects were asked to judge two versions of an ad for a digital camera, one providing specific and detailed information and the other showing generic travel images (things like maps).   When the ads appeared against a red background, subjects were more receptive to the detailed version; when they appeared against a blue background, subjects were drawn to the visual, if more generic, version.

These findings also reveal another interesting implication for integrating color with messaging and packaging:

[P]eople were more receptive to a new, fictional brand of toothpaste that focused on negative messages such as “cavity prevention” when the background colour was red, whereas people were more receptive to aspirational messages such as “tooth whitening” when the background colour was rendered in blue.

The release on Science Daily  is here.

The researchers’ findings show, first, that brand opinions are not static or fixed.

“The message is that people don’t just form brand opinions and stick with them,” said [Sharon] Shavitt, a professor of business administration. “Instead, they’re constantly monitoring their sense of understanding. They may in fact be swinging between doubt and closure more often than we think.”

Second, by requiring effort, consumers have to actively manage their understanding of the brand, rather than simply processing it along normal (and, presumably, unconscious) lines.

“A sense of difficulty threatens consumers’ metacognitive comfort zone and can lead them to doubt their understanding of an established brand,” Shavitt said. “Consumers expect a strong sense of understanding for those brands, and when that’s threatened it can lead them to be more open to reevaluating a brand.”

Shavitt goes on to claim that distracting situations may in fact be beneficial for brands—provided that the conditions induce doubt about previous understandings of the brand. In other words, not all distractions are helpful.

Marketers also can plant a sense of struggle, [Shavitt] said, such as contests or online surveys with new information that runs counter to a brand’s traditional image. McDonald’s, one of the brands included in the study, could instill doubt by asking consumers how many salad varieties are on menus or the sodium content of its burgers and fries, she said.

On one level, the results aren’t surprising. Marketers have known for a long time that the best marketing will challenge audiences’ presuppositions. People crave a sense of discovery, especially when it relates to something they’re already familiar with.

On another level, though, if the findings are accurate, brand awareness is much more malleable and dynamic than commonly believed.

One complaint: The Science Daily article reporting the study makes no distinction between forms of effort: it lumps physical distractions (such as blurry print) and cognitive dissonance together. My sense is that forcing audiences to reconcile dissonant ideas about a brand has far more beneficial effects than taxing the attention of the already distracted consumer.

Here’s the Science Daily article.

The study, which polled 6,000 consumers worldwide, also found that consumers are increasingly driven to identify leading companies as those that are “innovative, financially secure, ethical and possess the biggest market share.” This means traditional notions of competitive advantage are shifting, and that means how you communicate your values must shift as well:

The findings underscore the need for marketers to shift their business focus from being “driven by a coherent set of core values” to one that emphasizes how those “values [can] be communicated effectively at every touch point or companies risk undermining both their relationships with their customers and their long-term success,” said Mark Hass, CEO of MS&L Worldwide, a brand communications and consultancy network headquartered in New York.

Schools too often take their values as a given. After all, information about those Spring Break service trips are posted in the news archive and that page with the mission statement has been on the Web site for years. But the fact is, the values that an institution projects are generally (to extend Donald Rumsfeld’s epistemological categories) “unknown knowns.” That is, they’re things we don’t know we know because we’re too close to them. When we spend the bulk of our time talking to people who are equally invested in and knowledgeable of the institution’s values, we take it for granted that those values are apparent to everyone. However, what you say your brand values are and the values you project can be radically different. (And, at any rate, as this study indicates, consumers aren’t interested in what you say your values are; they’re inferring your values based on what they see or experience.) Take the example of the campus tour: How many schools tout their individualized approach to education–to large groups of prospective students and their families? Think prospects who are looking at everything with a critical eye–and who are hyper-aware of propaganda–don’t spot the disconnect?

Other findings:

72% of U.S. respondents believe that companies can have values just like the public does.

75% of Americans said companies have both a “higher purpose” and want to be financially successful, with honesty being a core component of that success.

56% of Americans said it is crucial for them to know about the values of the companies they do business with, while 33% said this was somewhat important.

Respondents polled in the survey also rated a company’s competition in the marketplace (87%) to be as important as environmental responsibility (82%).

While price and quality may be the primary purchase influencers in tough times, in the long run, it’s values that matter the most. 77% of consumers in the U.S. said they either strongly agree or somewhat agreed with that statement.

Millennials (ages 14 – 25) spend more time with media per week, but less time watching television, and mobile devices are primary entertainment channels for them.

Television remains the most impactful and influential advertising medium across all age groups, and watching television was the most preferred type of media for consumers as whole. Millennials were the exception with their media preferences scattered across TV, movies and the Internet; all were important to them

Fewer people are willing to pay for content in exchange for an ad-free environment. The percentage of people willing to cough up for no ads dropped to 26 percent in 2008 from 37 percent in 2007.

Millennials watch more UGC than professionally-produced content online, and they say they do so because it is more entertaining than traditional media choices.