What is a brand?

What is a brand?

Sustainable food chains make business sense and consumers happy

AGRI-FOOD SUSTAINABILITY: Sustainable food chains make business sense and consumers happy

Customers want food they can trust and expect retailers to do the ethical and environmental thinking for them

Responsible supermarkets are now making moves to ensure the sustainability of all of the fish they sell. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

In a year when horsemeat contamination and food waste have made the headlines, consumers are more conscious about the operation of the food system. Everyone wants food they can trust, but today's shoppers increasingly want more than that, and expect retailers to embed ethical and environmental sustainability in all of their products.

This was one of the messages that came out of a recent progress report by Sainsbury's, two years into its 20x20 sustainability commitments programme.

"Customers want us to act for them and ask the question and take the actions they would expect," said Justin King, chief executive ofSainsbury's, speaking at the launch of the report on 20 November.

"We can help them by taking on that responsibility and solving complex problems for them. Ultimately, the power of 24 million customers shopping with us will always mean we can make a big difference more quickly."

This mainstreaming of sustainability is a response to customers no longer seeing the issue as a bonus feature, sold under a label, such asFairtrade, with a price premium to match. Ethical and environmental sustainability is increasingly seen as fundamental, and consumers expect supermarkets to make it easy for them to live by those principles.

"When surveyed, most shoppers say that, on key ethical food issues, they want their supermarket to make those choices for them, before the product even reaches the shelf," says Kath Dalmeny, policy director of the charity Sustain, which campaigns for better food and farming.

Indeed, shoppers express surprise when they discover their trusted supermarket is selling endangered fish, for example. As Dalmeny says: "The more responsible of the major supermarkets are now making principled and cost-effective moves to ensure the sustainability of all of the fish they sell, to reduce the environmental footprint of products, and to pay fair prices to farmers in poor countries."

One of Sainsbury's commitments under the 20x20 plan, for instance, is for all of its fish to be independently certified as sustainable. It is also about to launch its own set of standards, run by an independent body, covering all of the 35 key raw materials in its supply chain that may not be fully covered by existing standards, such as Fairtrade, the Rainforest Alliance and the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC).

"MSC and Fairtrade are great and we want to be able to say our standards are independently audited across these 35 or so raw materials," said King.

This trend towards embedding sustainability is being seen in other sectors, too. Unilever, for example, introduced a Sustainable Living Planin November 2010, which it describes as "a driver of everything we do so that each time a consumer chooses one of our products, it improves their life, their community and the world we all share".

"Environmental sustainability is starting to be seen as more than an optional extra," says Duncan Williamson, food policy manager at WWF UK. "There are increasing numbers of businesses who are seeing the environment as core to their future business models."

Businesses also see sustainability as a way of engaging with their customers, and the issue of tackling waste lends itself well to this. Food waste is something consumers are increasingly conscious of and want to act on. In early November, the Waste & Resources Action Programme (Wrap) revealed that, since 2007, the UK has reduced avoidable household food waste by 21%.

Many consumers clearly care about this and it may seem counterintuitive for a supermarket to encourage consumers to waste less if it means they'll buy less. But, according to Alice Ellison, environment policy adviser at the British Retail Consortium, this is an important way of creating value. That means selling affordable food, "but also making sure we can make the most of it", she says.

Ellison cites a range of steps taken by retailers to reduce household food waste, from providing clear storage advice and recipe ideas to offering more portion sizes and designing packaging that extends a product's shelf life. "These have helped to drive significant reductions in the amount of food and drink we throw away," she notes.

According to Sainsbury's 20x20 update, the supermarket's Make Your Roast Go Further campaign, in January 2013, was one of its most successful of the year. This substantiates King's argument that there is a business rationale in helping consumers waste less.

"Helping customers spend less by buying and consuming everything they buy is in our long-term interest, if we help you do that better than our competitors … It's not good for us to have someone looking at a bag of salad in the bin thinking 'I was tempted to buy that at Sainsbury's, but I wasted it'."

Brand owners have realised that embedding sustainability into their supply chains and brand propositions is important to their survival, as well as giving customers what they want. The supply and demand sides are coming together under the sustainability agenda, and that's why it makes sense to embrace it.

"It's not just about CSR [corporate social responsibility]," says Williamson. "It's about resilience, and their medium- and long-term future. Companies are recognising that the core elements of the food system – water, land, ecosystem services and oil – are becoming scarcer and will cost more. A sustainable food system will need responsible business."

Posted by Bruce MacDonald

3 must-watch consumer trends to grow your business

A new BDC report indicates that Canadian consumers are more concerned than ever about how their choices affect the world around them. 

The report identified a series of powerful consumer trends that are creating rich opportunities for entrepreneurs. 

The BDC report is based on a national survey conducted by IPSOS on behalf of BDC. 

1. The socially responsible consumer
Social and environmental concerns are increasingly influential in the purchasing decisions of Canadians.

Many consumers want to buy from companies that adopt high ethical and environmental standards and are willing to pay more for socially responsible and eco-friendly products. 

By the numbers

• Half of Canadians are inclined to buy environmentally-friendly products.
• 75% of consumers would pay more for products and services from a socially responsible company.
• 90% of consumers would stop buying from a company using irresponsible practices.

Strategies for entrepreneurs

Strive to increase environmental and ethical responsibility in your company and supply chain. 

Forge partnerships with responsible suppliers and obtain certifications from trusted third-party organizations to bolster your credibility as a socially responsible business.

Promote your efforts in your marketing but make sure your claims are backed up with facts. Companies that are caught making exaggerated ethical or environmental marketing claims leave themselves open to attack by activists on social media and elsewhere. 

2. The “Made in Canada” advantage
Canadians are proud of products and services made in Canada and the jobs and other economic benefits that local businesses create. A majority now make an effort to buy local or Canadian-made products and many are willing to pay a premium. 

What’s more, Canada is perceived internationally as a “model country,” with open, trustworthy people and safe, high-quality products. 

By the numbers

• Two thirds of Canadians have made an effort to buy local in the past year.
• 30% of Canadians are willing to pay more for a locally made product.

 

Strategies for entrepreneurs

Your business should highlight the local characteristics of your products.

Even if your products are not made locally, your business should emphasize other local features of your operation such as jobs created, R&D, product design and/or product assembly. All of these can lead to premium product positioning.

Promote your company with the “Made in Canada” brand at home and abroad to capitalize on positive perceptions.

For more information on this trend, read BDC Chief Economist Pierre Cléroux’s column in Profit$ magazine, Canada: A powerful brand. 

3. The healthy consumer
The demand for health and wellness-related products is increasing rapidly.

Consumers are actively seeking products and services to help them maintain and improve their health. This trend is changing the type of products they purchase for their family and how they spend their leisure time.

It will continue to accelerate as the population ages—about 25% of the population will be over the age of 65 by 2031.  

By the numbers

• 33% of Canadians are willing to pay a premium for health-enhancing products.
• $935 is the average annual per capita personal expenditures on health and wellness in Canada.

 

Strategies for entrepreneurs

Highlight health-related benefits of your products, including research-backed results that link the product’s ingredients to health benefits.

Adapt existing products and services or provide new ones to meet the public’s desire for a healthier lifestyle.

The Future of Social Selling

By David Howell

 

Social media has transformed retailing. The question that corporations are now asking is how will this channel evolve in the future?

 

There is no denying that social media has had a profound impact on the sales funnel. The power and influence that consumers now have is unprecedented in the history of retailing. Brand owners seeing this shift have been quickly attempting to evolve their businesses into social enterprises that pay close attention to the new relationships that social media has delivered to their companies – some with more success than others. 

What has become abundantly clear is that at the heart of this new retail landscape is how consumer behaviour has changed. Understanding these changes is now at the heart of brand development that is being played out across the current social media platforms. And accepting that ‘current’ is an important aspect to appreciate is key, as social media is in constant flux.

In their report for Hearsay Social Forrester state: “The social ecosystem is no longer a single, unified set of tools competing for the same resources and users — and it really never was. Instead, advanced businesses focus their investments in social tools by what phase of the customer life cycle the tool facilitates, in addition to the business objective for interactions with their end customers. Sales professionals do not use social channels in the same way that marketers do, and therefore need their own set of capabilities to succeed today.”

 Marketing To The Individual 

One clear component of the future of social selling is that even more focus on the individual will be required. The broadcast model for marketing campaigns has moved aside as social media has asserted a one-to-one relationship with brands and their consumers.What is now important is that the realignment of the sales funnel and how social media has impacted on its lifecycle is appreciated and acted upon by all corporations. In addition, the future of social selling will mean that sales, marketing and PR departments work increasingly closely together, as they all have a stake in how their businesses utilise social media within their sales channels. 

However, Forrester did point out: “The sales professionals that we spoke to were relatively dismissive of corporate social marketing and its ability to help them close more business. While Forrester has seen many successful social marketing efforts that track their ROI through increased lead volume and conversion, those successes were not recognized by the sales teams in this study. Sales either had no visibility into what corporate marketing was doing, common for sales agents, or didn’t know how marketing could directly help win more business at all, common among sales enablement professionals and sales managers.” 

This lack of transparency and cooperation must also change as they are at the foundation of the future development of social selling. Understanding how social media impacts on each stage of the buying cycle is of paramount importance, as often the key stakeholders in the buying cycle use social media for different outcomes and at different points in the consumer buying cycle. Ratifying these relationships to create a seamless customer journey is clearly an important aspect of social selling as it develops over the next few years. 

The future of social selling will also increasingly be visual. A number of reports have concluded that video content and also images are powerful marketing tools that consumers are using as touch points when they are looking for goods or services to buy. The exponential growth of Pinterest is testament to this trend. Corporations will need to think increasingly visually with their marketing efforts to lock into a trend that shows little sign of slowing.

Soft Metrics

Another core aspect of social selling that will develop rapidly as this channel matures is how these relationships are tracked from initial contact to conversion. Often the social channel is lamented as being weak when tracking of ROI is concerned. The tools that are available at the moment are nascent, but will rapidly evolve to offer the kind of data that corporations are looking for. 

There will always be an intangible ‘soft’ metric that must be considered when conversion statistics are considered, but brands are understanding that the hard application of data when coupled with sales statistics won’t give highly accurate ROI, as social selling often relies on a number of intangibles, such as the impact that the so-called ‘recommendation economy’ can have on the performance of a sales channel. 

In addition, the future of social selling will mean a quantification of what it means to be a follower on Twitter, or the actual value of a like on Facebook. How a corporation’s customers interact with its brand and the iteration of those values across social networks will be important to build into the fabric of all marketing campaigns.

What is clear for all brands to see is that social shopping has yet to reach its peak. As the rules of engagement and best practice continue to change as the social media networks themselves evolve, brands can feel lost as they wrestle to understand how social shopping can be managed within their sales funnels. A loser grip on traditional values practices is the key to success in the social shopping space. Listen before acting is a mantra to adopt.
 

How Consumers Are Using Their Phones, And What It Means

By: Josh Luger

dMobile is no longer a communications utility, but a media distribution hub. According to eMarketer, mobile now accounts for 12 percent of Americans' media consumption time, triple its share in 2009.

Where is this consumer attention being focused?

The biggest beneficiaries have been mobile apps. Time spent on apps dwarfs time spent on the mobile Web, and smartphone owners now spend 127 minutes per day in mobile apps.

In a recent report from BI Intelligence, we analyze the main mobile usage trends developers and publishers should consider to be successful in mobile, detail how users are consuming content on their mobile devices, take a look at the most popular mobile activities, and examine how mobile usage is an additive activity.

Here's an overview of the four usage trends developers and publishers should consider: 

The rise of gaming: Games are the largest mobile app category and the biggest money-maker in the app stores, accounting for 70% of Apple's top-grossing apps. However, even with the most addictive games, consumers' attention is fleeting and companies run the risk of becoming "one-hit wonders." 

Mobile-social synergies: Social networking apps are the second largest time bucket for mobile users. 39% of mobile users access social networks. This includes mobile versions of desktop favorites, as well as mobile-first networks like Instagram. Mobile holds promise for the social category, but monetization is far from a sure thing. 

The piggyback rule: The only tried-and-true way for a mobile success is to take a popular usage category and build a product that piggybacks on that activity to provide a unique mobile-native experience. Instagram did it with photos, "Angry Birds" with games, but other usage categories — news, weather, travel, video etc. — are waiting for a similar hit.

Portal erosion: Mobile is a fragmented space, and consumers seem to like it that way. No one has succeeded aggregating services via a single app or mobile website. The desktop portal is fading with the advent of mobile. Yahoo Mail Traffic declined 12% in the 12 months leading up to December 2012. Carrier attempts to build mobile portals have failed miserably. 

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-consumers-are-using-their-phones-2013-5#ixzz2UDokhvuB

The 4 toughest environmental challenges in business

By Brian O'Keefe 

Industry experts offer fixes for some of the green world's thorniest issues: solar expansion, recycling, establishing standards, and feeding the world's growing population sustainably.
 
FORTUNE -- Sometimes the best way to make a real breakthrough is to set an impossible goal.

Think of President John F. Kennedy's 1961 speech in which he called for the United States to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Many dismissed the idea as preposterous. But, sure enough, by July 20, 1969, the Eagle had landed at Tranquility Base. The seemingly unachievable became reality.

The roughly 350 attendees at Fortune's Brainstorm Green conference last week participated in their own experiment in the power of audacious goal setting. They were challenged to come up with practical ways to make a quantum leap forward in four key areas of sustainability: solar power, recycling, measuring the environmental impact of products, and scaling up food production to match population growth.

The program was developed to give the conference-goers a chance to go deeper on important environmental topics -- to help create solutions rather than just talk about problems. Jib Ellison, founder and CEO of Blu Skye Consulting, helped design the "rapid prototyping" approach.

Here's how it worked. The attendees were split up into four groups, one for each challenge question. Each group had a facilitator and a team of discussion leaders with expertise in the challenge area. They had 85 minutes to brainstorm. (A bit less than Kennedy gave NASA to get to the moon, granted, but enough to exchange some stimulating ideas.) Each group then came up with a few concrete recommendations. And all of the participants were given a chance to sign up to work on advancing the sustainable solutions proposed in some way. Here's what they came up with:

 

Challenge #1: How do we put solar on 50% of rooftops in the U.S. by 2018?

There is some positive momentum in the solar world. Net generation of power from solar more than doubled in the U.S. last year, according to the Energy Information Administration, but it remains a fraction of what is produced from coal or natural gas. About 83,000 homes installed photovoltaic systems in 2012 bringing the U.S total to roughly 300,000.

But given that there are more than 100 million households in the U.S., the idea of putting solar on 50% of rooftops is daunting. There are myriad challenges. One big one is consumer awareness. Many -- if not most -- potential customers are not even aware if solar is available to them, much less how to go about getting it.

In one of the customer issues brainstorming groups, NRG (NRG) Energy CEO David Crane, who was floating around the room as a discussion leader and whose company is aggressively working to install residential photovoltaic systems, wondered aloud, "Is most solar sold to the wife or the husband?"

Another problem is that the U.S. power grid wasn't designed to handle a lot of power being generated at end points -- i.e. homes -- and the excess being fed back into the system. If the U.S. is going to achieve 50% penetration of homes with solar power, it will require changes to the grid system.

Ellison of Blu Skye coordinated the solar session, dividing the 50 or so conference attendees into four groups, each of which would spend 12 minutes brainstorming on each of four aspects of the challenge: technical, customer, finance, and policy, then rotate to the next topic.

Roughly an hour later, the discussions leaders summarized some of the best ideas for solving the solar challenge in the four categories.

Policy: The group recommended "green default permitting" -- meaning that it should be okay to put photovoltaic panels on your house without a permit. Laura Spanjian, sustainability director for the city of Houston, said they would like to create a program to incentivize cities to take action. "That's where the action is going to happen," said Spanjian. "We want something that is similar to Race to the Top where the federal government gave money to cities to improve schools." The policy group also emphasized the need for long-term financing that is government-backed. For instance, the federal government could offer discounted mortgages with a few basis points off for homeowners who install solar.

Finance: The consensus of the finance group was that solar financing needs both scale and standardization to drive the liquid capital in U.S. markets to solar and drive down the cost of capital for the industry. One key factor in making that happen, they agreed, is securitization. The industry must create assets that are at least 20 years long and government-backed. The big concept they came up with is a federal "green bank" to back these assets and prove them to the market.

Technical: "The challenge here is turning on PV at 50 million end points, on the average of 5 kilowatts each, and somehow we're going to keep the lights on at everyone's home with 250 kilowatts of distributed solar," said Naimesh Patel, CEO of Gridco systems and one of the discussion leaders. To accomplish 50% penetration without crashing the grid system, Patel's group proposed standardization at two levels. First, they want to create a communications infrastructure to manage all the end points and the utility infrastructure that's taking this power and has to manage it. Second, they want to create uniform processes for everything from installation to training to maintenance procedures themselves. 

Customer: The big theme is that the industry needs to do a better job of reaching customers and making it easy for them to install solar -- and thereby encourage powerful word-of-mouth referrals. With that in mind, they propose that the industry should put a huge emphasis on customer service. One big idea for reaching more customers is to team up with companies or organizations that have existing relationships to large pools of customers, such as Home Depot (HD), Lowe's (LOW), security companies, and local governments.

 

Challenge #2: How do we double America's recycling rate in five years?
Most Americans do a little recycling. The trick is to get them to do a whole lot more. The facilitator of this challenge group was Erin Billman, a principal at Blu Skye Consulting. She had five people make pitches, then they set up stations in the room and people "voted with their feet" and chose the area they wanted to work in. The best-attended group, No. 5, was about how to raise recycling rates by increasing consumer education.

The groups worked together for about 30 minutes, then came back to present their conclusions. Here's what they came up with:

Group 1: The focus was thinking about the economy holistically -- government, business, consumer. "Our vision: convene a national dialogue to create a shared imperative to drive an efficient circular economy through active collaboration," said Gary Sova, senior vice president, national accounts, Republic Services. Where to have this summit? SC Johnson has offered Wingspread, the Frank Lloyd Wright residence now used by the Johnson Foundation as a conference center, as a place to start.

Group 2: Is it possible to activate youth by creating a Recycling Corps? That was the question at hand. The vision was to come up with a program that is scalable across the country. First thing to do is find a host location, probably a university, said discussion leader Kevin Anton, chief sustainability officer at Alcoa (AA). The program could be modeled after Teach for America.

Group 3: This discussion focused on how businesses can work together on off-take agreements. "We struggled for a shared vision," said Teri Shanahan, vice president, sustainability for International Paper (IP). "The shared vision is there isn't one clear obvious answer. It's pretty clear that this is easier to do when there's an economic benefit for someone in a supply chain." One (very, very big) action they proposed would be to redesign the entire waste system.

Group 4: The group had an energetic conversation about product design in relation to recyclability, or "designing for abundance." Before we reuse and recycle, the idea is to "redesign, renew, and regenerate."

One action item is to identify an industry-leading company in each of the major materials categories -- paper, plastic, metal, organics, glass -- and ask them to take the lead on new design standards that are more sustainable. David, Steiner, CEO of Waste Management (WM), suggested that his company might be willing to sponsor a design institute to coordinate these efforts.

Group 5: None of the above approaches will be effective without motivating consumers -- the focus of this group, facilitated by Suzanne Shelton of sustainability marketing agency The Shelton Group. Much of the conversation centered on making recycling more of a social norm through the use of games and social media. But one effective way to get consumers more involved, it was suggested, is just to double the size of curbside recycling bins and challenge consumers to fill them. 

Challenge #3: How can standards and labels better measure and communicate the environmental impact of our products?
The crux of this challenge is simple: Ratings are a huge pain. Companies haven't figured out how to present them in a way that they themselves, investors, or consumers understand. "Assessments suck. That could have been the title of the session maybe, but we're trying to make them better and we're trying to make them more efficient," said Kara Hurst, CEO of The Sustainability Consortium.

There is tension between publishing sustainability ratings quickly in a relatable format and publishing correct information. GoodGuide has taken the philosophy of publishing as many ratings as it can as quickly as possible, then correcting on the back end. "Our model is, 'There is no perfect system,'" said Dara O'Rourke, GoodGuide's co-founder and Chief Sustainability Officer. "The science of sustainability is completely incomprehensible to customers. We've got to figure out how to boil down the complexity of the sustainability information into something that actually resonates."

The facilitator of the ratings sessions summarized the group's conclusions thusly. "What does not work? Wonky stuff and fear," said Michael Ellis, partner, CleanTech Group/GreenOrder. "What does? Delighting customers."

To that end, Nike (NKE), for one, doesn't market the sustainability of products to consumers, according to Hannah Jones, Nike's VP of sustainable business and innovation. The idea is to tell stories about positive stuff that the company is doing because consumers respond well to progress, positivity, and innovation.

Another theme is that companies should use standards to determine where they might work together, and where they can't. As Jones of Nike said: "Let's get surgical about where we compete, and I promise you I'll kick your ass there, but let's collaborate on everything else."

 

Challenge #4: How do we sustainably produce enough protein to feed the world?
When you talk about feeding the world, there are a couple of big-picture facts that drive the conversation: The world's population is growing, from roughly 7 billion now to an estimated 9 billion by 2050. And as prosperity spreads, more of those people are demanding to eat more protein in the form of meat.

In the discussion about how to meet this challenge, three themes emerged: the need for product innovation, the necessity of reducing the meat industry's environmental footprint, and the fact that consumer behavior needs to be altered.

The facilitator, Aron Cramer, CEO of Business for Social Responsibility, divided the group into four sections:

Meat: A lot of the discussion was about the tension between the benefits of responsible production vs. sustainable consumption. There's a growing body of thought that to feed the world a growing demand for protein, we're going to have to do more with less. We need to use genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and make use of and develop new farming techniques. That's opposed by the sustainable consumption camp, which believes we just need to eat less.

One thing the group did agree on, according to Dennis Treacey, chief sustainability officer at Smithfield Foods (SFD), was energy production and the importance of making sure manure products could be used to generate energy. They expressed concern about soybeans and corn being the primary food source for pigs and suggested sorgum and grasses as alternative feed stocks.

Seafood: A big topic for the seafood group was aquiculture, and the biggest issue with aquiculture is feed. There are groups using algae for the production of biofuel but they don't use all the algae; the waste product needs to be turned into food for fish. Other options were also discussed: insect protein (some places harvest fly larvae, which have "squiggly little legs but no wings yet" and make it into fish feed).

Another option: the possibility of multi-trophic aquiculture, which means a fish farm surrounded by a mollusk farm surrounded by a kelp farm. It was pointed out that fish are highly efficient in terms of their "feed conversion ratio" -- the amount of stuff that goes in vs. comes out. It takes 1.5 kilos of feed to generate a kilo of fish. For a chicken it would take over 2 kilos, for a pig 5 kilos, and for a cow 7 to 10 kilos.

Plant-based protein: This group proposed a data-driven solution. They agreed that it was important to bring transparency into the cost of meat production and to generate peer-reviewed data on those costs. However, they also agreed that they faced a big marketing challenge. Plant based proteins may be clean and natural, but they may not sell as well as a juicy steak.

Consumers: The consensus was that education is the most important factor in changing consumer behavior. Bottom line: Most people don't understand how much they're eating. The group suggested programs like meatless Mondays. They also pointed out that it's important to raise awareness at restaurants, since 50% of meals are not eaten at home.

Reporting by Shelley DuBois, Leigh Gallagher, and Jennifer Reingold

15 Stats Brands Should Know About Millennials

Saya Weissman

Like all new generations, millennials are often misunderstood. The rap on them is they’re serial oversharers in constant need of acknowledgment and feedback.

And, of course, some of that is true. But it’s just as true that this newest generation is an optimistic bunch who are trying to make the best of the economic climate and tough job market.

Here are 15 interesting stats about the coveted class of consumers who are also your employees.

There are about 79 million millennials in the U.S., versus the 48 million Generation Xers (born between 1965 and 1980). (ComScore)

Millennials will make up 50 percent of the U.S. workforce by 2030. (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

23 percent of companies reported having heavy contact with parents of millennial employees. (Collegiate Employment Research Institute)

4 percent of employers involved reported parents attended their children’s job interviews. (CERI)

31 percent of employers involved reported parents submitted resumes on behalf of their offspring. (CERI)

27 percent of millennials are self-employed. (The Millennial Generation Research Review)

80 percent of millennials sleep with their phones next to their beds. (The Millennial Generation Research Review)

Millennials send about 20 texts per day. (Pew Social Trends)

15 percent of millennials, versus 7 percent of Gen Xers at a similar stage of life, said having a high-paying career is important. (The Millennial Generation Research Review)

The purchasing power of millennials is estimated to be $170 billion per year. (ComScore)

Millennial unemployment rate in January 2013 increased to the highest rate recorded for this demographic to 13.1 percent versus the national average of 7.1 percent. (U.S. Department of Labor.)

56 percent of millennials think technology helps people use their time more efficiently. (Pew Social Trends)

14 percent of millennials use Twitter. (Pew Social Trends)

31 percent of millennials said they earn enough money to lead the kind of life they want, versus 46 percent of Gen Xers. (Pew Social Trends)

41 percent of millennials have no landline at home and rely on their cellphones for communication. (Pew Social Trends)