My son’s in the eighth grade. It is interesting to observe how these school children are influencing each other when it comes to choosing mobile phones and even mobile operators. In Sweden, when Vodafone was sold off to Telenor, they changed their logo colours from Vodafone red to Telenor blue. Telenor ran heavy and expensive campaigns on pretty much all types of media about this colour change. One of the girls in my son’s class said quite loudly in front of a bunch of her friends: “I don’t like blue, I like red better!” And within 3-4 months, most of the kids in that class, including my son, had mobile phones and subscriptions from the operator 3 who happens to have a reddish logo. Is this girl an Alpha User? You bet! And then my son went around saying that Nokia phones are not cool, they are for old people. In the last school event, I asked a few kids in the class what phones they have. They were all, either SonyEricsson, or Samsung. And that considering that Nokia overall has the biggest marketshare. This word of mouth seems to work both ways - for a product or service, as much as against it. Read: Children, School and Mobile Phones.
