How Branded Stickers Survive and Thrive in a Growing Millennial Market.
From plain text to stickers, GIFs, emojis, and millennial conversations on messaging apps grew. For a simple reason that these conversation media formats have won millennial hearts from a young age. And messaging and keyboard apps have understood this connection.
They know what millennials desire and are making investments to enhance their content offerings.
But it is not just millennials who are loving emojis, stickers, GIFs, and memes.
Did you observe your parents having a fascination with sharing stickers about every greeting and chat on WhatsApp lately?
Funny stickers are like emojis on steroids, capable of conveying a sentence or phrase. Stickers in communications, they're getting increasingly common.
Stickers are a blast! They bring colours and expressions to your digital conversations. Such development brings an opportunity! And brands recognize this as well.
Stickers, in general, have been a part of branding for so long. In the fashion sector, free stickers from brands are in high demand. They create a sense of loyalty and pride for the users and make users the brand ambassadors of the brands.
And, boy, there is a lot of noise about I Voted stickers and their prevalence on social media. Some civilians now sometimes find themselves dissatisfied because they did not receive stickers after voting! How hilarious is that?
An obvious progression is using digital stickers for marketing. And brands went gaga for this. Platforms like Holler and Bobble AI, enabled brands in their quest to become a part of digital conversations.
Stella Artois partnered with Holler and created amazing stickers around their "FriendsGiving" campaign. People shared these stickers with friends for chatting when they used the popular payment app Venmo.
Prime Video collaborated with Bobble AI to promote the "Cinderella" movie launched in 2020. With hyper-contextual targeting, Cinderella not just became a part of users' conversation around the movie, but also made for quirky responses.
According to a Harris Poll research, roughly a third of millennials (those aged 18 to 34) use visual such as stickers and emojis acknowledge images are far superior to words to communicate what they think and feel.
"I'm a millennial who enjoys collecting stickers. Pusheen, Piske & Usagi, and Opi are some of my favorite sticker sets on Facebook and I use them a lot.", claimed one.
How many other millennials feel like her?
Quite a lot.
Enough for Line and Snapchat, Disney and Starbucks, Sephora and Garfield, to earn a profit. Every day, almost 380 million stickers are traded on Facebook Messenger alone.
But why should brands consider stickers over social media marketing for millennial audience?
Millennials spend nearly twice as much time online as the previous generation. They are the original generation that grew up with the internet.
Furthermore, they spend nearly an hour every day on the Facebook app.
Twitter's mobile users account for 60% of its total users. That's a lot of possibilities for marketing.
But even though millennials love their social media platforms they are also the once most annoyed when shown targeted ads.
And as far as traditional marketing is concerned. Traditional advertisements are no longer effective since 84 percent of millennials do not believe in traditional advertising. In a world dominated by marketing, companies have just one option: master the art of digital encounters.
Ask any millenial when was the last time they were moved by a tradition ad? Millenials can't wait to skip ads and they are skilled at ignoring them wherever they can.
Millennials don't hate marketing they just want it to be interesting. They also want brands to engage with them in more humane ways.
Stickers caters to all the whims of millennials and meet brand expectations
Stickers are fun and engaging for users.
Stickers help millennials understand the values of a brand.
Stickers have high shareability.
Your millennial food blogger buddy, for example, is considerably more likely to show you Starbucks' new series of winter coffee stickers than their ad in this month's Popular Beverages.
Stickers are gaining popularity among companies because they pack a significantly more personal reaction than branded emojis, allowing them to better promote their products.
For example, if KFC were to make a branded emoji keyboard with the Colonel, he'd probably be an animated caricature.
Takeaway
Finding the correct mix between conventional and digital experiences is crucial for millennial engagement.
Sticker use is expected to increase in the future, according to modern communication trends. By 2025, the worldwide virtual goods industry is expected to be worth $189.76 billion.
Make sure to take a note of it next time your father gets tempted to check out a Domino's new pizza offer by coming across its animated sticker in his Facebook group!