How teenage slang can improve your marketing

With all the buzz about ‘teenglish’, you might get the impression that it’s a new phenomenon. Well, it’s not. Believe it or not, youth culture existed long before the iPhone and Facebook.

Young people have always used slang and heavily coded language to differentiate themselves from outsiders. And marketers can use this linguistic labyrinth to reach a growing number of consumers.

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Millennials. Generation Y. Echo Boomers. Students. Whatever you want to call them, 15-34 year-olds around the world are evolving at warp speed in terms of language. And Twitter is a big part of this language explosion. On Twitter, users must convey their message with as few words as possible, so tweets often contain succinct lingo and abbreviations similar to text messages.

This efficient method of communication teaches us to edit and hone our messages for greater impact. But while twitter jargon doesn’t necessarily equal slang, everything you’ll find in the twittonary does reflect the influence of youth culture and technology. And these recent changes in the English language are a good thing. It’s a part of how we adapt to cultural shifts and innovation. 

Cracking the code
So why is this important? For one, young people are a media-savvy demographic. They tend to be cynical, untrusting of traditional marketing tricks, and they have a notoriously short attention span. These factors make the youth market an incredibly difficult nut to crack.

But it’s a nut you might want to crack. The purchasing power of Americans born between 1982 and 2000 is more than USD 200 billion a year. And as these people quickly become the decision-makers at large and small business across a vast range of industries, marketers need to stay on top of the fast growing youth lexicon.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to appear disingenuous when incorporating slang or social media jargon into a campaign. It’s the language of sub-cultures, not corporations, right? So what’s a company to do?

Probably the best advice is to understand youth culture and understand the language – but don’t mock; instead use it with respect. Because sometimes a little respect is the best kind of street cred.