The industry-first claim is no doubt true, on a narrow construction, but Hilton is a relative laggard when it comes to youth sub-brands. Marriott got into the game in 2017 with Moxy by Marriott, which targets ‘fun hunters’ by, among other things, putting on lip-synch battles.
Indeed, youth-oriented sub-brands are cropping up everywhere, from telecommunications to airlines, and Contagious covered the phenomenon in our magazine at the beginning of the year.
At the time we spoke with people from Vodafone (which created its Voxy network for younger consumers) and Marriott, and the consensus was that companies use sub-brands to reach new audiences with experimental propositions without jeopardising the parent brand.
The flip side is a risk is that these new customers will age out of the youth brand without graduating onto the parent brand. That’s an easy fix and why you often see things like ‘by Marriott’ or ‘by Hilton’ in the youth-brand’s name.
But there’s a bigger problem, too: many youth brands segment consumers into groups that are too vague to mean anything, or they pander to a need that isn't really there. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science’s Are Big Brands Dying report looked at marketing share and penetration among the top five brands in 14 categories and concluded, ‘the overwhelming empirical evidence shows that younger consumers neither distrust nor reject big brands. They certainly continue to buy them.’
It’s for this reason that Contagious has been a bit hesitant about embracing the trend for youth sub-brands. But for as long as they offer a sticking-plaster solution for parent brands that have become irrelevant to swathes of the population, I suspect we’ll keep seeing them.
