GLOBAL: Learning tribes and the new youth market

Cast your mind back to your student days. Which tribe did you belong to? Your choices are: Seekers, Gekkos, Bonos, Kids or Surfers? Oh all right, some of those words were not currency in your day, but you will get the idea. The International Graduate Insight Group (i-graduate) found, from feedback on some 25,000 international students from more than 190 nations, that they did not conform to national stereotypes.

Will Archer, director of i-graduate, revealed these ‘learning tribes’ to the conference:

*The Seekers comprise some 24% of the sample and are influenced by their parents: they study because they want to get a job, they are conservative in their aspirations and shun the limelight.

*The Gekkos ( named after the Michael Douglas character in the film Wall Street) make up 23% of the sample and are motivated by money, status and recognition from their peers. Their personal life is less important to them than for the Seekers.

*The Bonos (after the saintly singer) represent 22% and are in higher education for the ‘greater good. They want to change the world and are independently-minded.

*The Kids comprise 20% of the survey and have unfocused enthusiasm and indiscriminate ambition; they are less mature and unquestioning.

*The Surfers, 11% of the sample, are there for life's experience: fun and self-development. They don't have as many ambitions as the other tribes.

Contrary to popular conceptions of Japanese students being seriously hard working and highly focused, they formed the highest proportion of Surfers among Asian students. There was no significant difference between the genders among the tribes overall or in age: 29% of Kids were under-19 and 18% were over-30.

Archer suggested some lessons to be learned from this data. He said universities should make sure they understand their customers and kept track of their perceptions; they must ‘hard-wire’ this information into marketing and decision-making; they must map alumni – beyond geography – and get to know “ambassadors and assassins" and find out why they chose to be one or the other. This follows the old marketing belief that a dissatisfied customer will tell 10 people whereas a happy customer will tell only one.

"Recognise or reject the new learning tribes. But if you reject them, still recognise that in today's confused converging world of individualism, national borders no longer define customer behaviour."

Colin Gilligan, visiting professor of marketing at Northumbria University, painted a picture of a world where changing demographies, an increasing number of private sector players and a rise in the number of countries competing for overseas students was creating "a huge wave of change and a search for value".

"Today's students are more demanding, discriminating, litigious, cleverer and desperately competitive – especially in the US and Australia – and they face rapid technological changes," Gilligan said. "They are far less loyal, they are easily bored, and they are media and technologically literate."

The new student was an investor demanding a return on fees, a journalist (blogger), a social networker (Facebook), brand-savvy, and experience and excitement-seeking, so universities had to understand the new youth market and the changing student. He urged the audience to subscribe to trend monitoring sites to keep up with the times, as potential students would be seeking "the best of the best".