Brand awareness resonates among young people

WHAT IT MEANS AND WHY IT’S IMPORTANT — Take a quick glance at the top 10 list, and not knowing that these are the brands resonating with today’s children/young adults, you might mistake this for a list of the top 10 advertising campaigns. Or the top 10 social media campaigns. Or the top 10 Super Bowl commercials. Or the top 10 things you’ll most likely find in your teen’s room.

(THE NEWS: Harris Interactive: M&M first in brand equity among youth. For the full story, click here)

The bottom line, tomorrow’s shoppers already are becoming familiar with today’s brands in ways that yesterday’s marketers could hardly ever have dreamed about — interactively online on individual branded Web pages or through such sites as YouTube (type “Doritos Super Bowl commercial” into the search engine and you’ll get some 4,500 hits. Google “Doritos Super Bowl commercial” and you’ll get 7,000).

On Facebook, for example, half of the brands listed in the top 10 have well more than 1 million fans on at least one of their fan pages (and many of them have multiple fan pages, some perhaps unofficial). There are some 1.4 million Facebook aficionados who have taken the time to “like” Doritos. As many as 2.2 million are fans of Google, 3.3 million of Target, 3.5 million of Subway and a whopping 6.6 million of Disney Pixar.

If you were to use the number of Facebook fans who “liked” an iconic brand to gauge any kind of “hipness” factor, then Walmart isn’t too far behind with 2.2 million fans on one page. And Walgreens is fast approaching that 1 million watermark with more than 700,000 fans to date.

And judging from the amount of sweets on these top 10 lists, there won’t be too many tomorrows before today’s young adults begin “friending” their local pharmacists and “liking” their local pharmacies.