Teen Vogue x The Case for Her Brief Response: The App

Emma Lindley BA (Hons) Fashion Promotion Manchester Metropolitan University A unique annonymous sexual health and wellbeing app, with a professionally monitored forum, clinic locator and exclusive content.

App walkthrough video https://vimeo. com/415960760

Supporting Statement

Correlated sexual health themed Teen Vogue articles, updated daily.

This app aims to offer young women a platform to seek advice from peers and health care professionals anonymously to help develop their confidence about their own sexual health and wellbeing.

With resources that support female sexual health and wellbeing severely lacking, young women could struggle to discover the answers that allow them to feel confident within themselves and their own needs. Utilising the positive brand values of Teen Vogue, I have developed an innovative app that gives young women a platform to discover the information and advice they need to move forward in their sexual wellbeing journey. With male sexual health playing a major part in sex education within in schools and being a talking point in mainstream society (Bushe, 2019), it can be hard for females to be heard and have their questions answered.

Collection of forum pages the user could be interested in shown on home page.

Accounts of health care professionals are easily differentiated by obvious colouring and verified logo.

Conversation of the day for brand to interact with audience.

Anonymous Forum

The app is built around the main feature of the anonymous forum. This allows users to ask and discuss real-life issues with each other, without fear of embarrassment or being ridiculed. Teen Vogue want to empower young women through education, and this platform allows this demographic to educate themselves on topics personal to them. Healthcare professionals will also be on hand to advise on these forums where needed, to help correct any misleading information. These professionals will be given verified accounts that are easily identifiable against other users, thus giving reassurance that the app is a safe, regulated and reliable space to explore personal, intimate subjects.

Additional App Features

Additional information can be easily accessed by users through further app functions. The Clinic Locator can be used to find the closest sexual health clinic, with reviews to put nervous minds at rest. Exclusive sexual health and wellbeing articles are also included to act as a USP, pulling the audience into downloading the app, rather than solely the website.

App exclusive articles, tutorials and advice.

Clinic reviews from peers to put nervous minds at rest.

Concept to Realisation

Concept Original Thinking The USP of the Teen Vogue Let’s Get Talking App is the level of interactive engagement the user has with the brand and others while utilising the anonymous forum. This allows users to feel confident in their questions and discover themselves. An anonymous forum has not been brought into the sexual health and wellbeing market yet, nor to this target consumer. This makes the app completely innovative, alongside the inclusion of healthcare professions to ensure that all advice that is given is true and safe. This, paired with the locator tool and other exclusive content, makes for the perfect sexual health and wellbeing guide for young people.

While looking at the current app market and Teen Vogue’s direct competition in terms of magazines, inspiration has been drawn from the way they market and communicate with their audience. The apps found were mainly aimed at an older demographic, leaving a gap in the market for Teen Vogue to fill. Many of these apps also use a podcast format, of which Let’s Get Talking will steer away from in order to stand out from competitors.

Non-interactive portal of information in app form.

Guided self care podcast based apps aimed at an older target consumer.

‘Chatty’ love life podcast created by Cosmopolitan

Creativity and Inspiration With the idea of ‘self-care’ being all over social media (Arboine, 2019) sexual health and wellbeing should be included in this discussion. For young women, this can be hard. With a lack of resources and a social taboo surrounding the conversation, a creativity devloped platform was needed to fill the void in young peoples lives. Utilising their favoured applications as and Teen Vogue’s values of educating the younger generation as a basis, the Let’s Get Talking app was created to educate and advise young people on this journey, using fun illustrations and light-hearted copy to stay creative and innovative while still being informative.

Teen Vogue’s current branding is built on a ‘easygoing’ atmosphere and laidback approach to make the important subjects they cover easy to understand for a younger demographic. Colours and fonts already used by Teen Vogue have been incorporated to give a clear link between brand and platform. The fun illustrations that are also used throughout Teen Vogue’s sexual health articles will also be used to tie it all together.

Relevance to market The concept was born out of a need for a new, innovative platform that gives the digital focused youth of today a place to turn for guidance and advice on sexual health and wellbeing. Generation Z are self proclaimed digital natives (Francis and Hoefel, 2018), and see technology as ‘an extention of themselves’ (Vigo, 2019:online). This demonstrates that brands should be aiming to reach their target consumer online and this would be the best place to give this generation advice. With Reddit and Twitch amongst the most popular downloads with this demographic (Webb, 2019), this group are clearly engaged with their peers, both friends and strangers through these platforms.

Primary Research

While conducting primary research with Generation Z, I found that this target consumer could have some self confessed gaps in their sexual health and wellbeing knowledge. They would also like to be given information in app form as opposed to any other. This also provides a gap for Teen Vogue to fill, presenting this age group with the information they need on a platform they want.

How confident are you with your sexual health and wellbeing knowledge?

In what ways would you like to receive more information about personal sexual health and wellbeing? Select all that apply.

Realisation App walkthrough video

Application Prototype Artboards

https://vimeo. com/415960760

https://adobe. ly/2WZDgFd

References

Bushe, F. (2019) Yes! Yes! Yes! We must break the silence about female pleasure [online] (accessed on 30th April 2020) https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/apr/24/female-pleasure-fran-bushe-sexual-dysfunction Francis, F., Hoefel, F. (2018) ‘True Gen’: Generation Z and it’s implecations for companies [online] (accessed on 22nd May 2020) https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/true-gen-generation-z-and-itsimplications-for-companies Vigo, J. (2019) Generation Z and New Technology’s Effect on Culture [online] (accessed on 7th April 2020) https://www. forbes.com/sites/julianvigo/2019/08/31/generation-z-and-new-technologys-effect-on-culture/#472d14165c2a Webb, K. (2019) Generation Z favoured apps [online] (accessed on 9th May 2020) https://www.businessinsider.com/ report-generation-z-favorite-apps-2019-5?r=US&IR=T Arboine, N. (2019) Has Self-Care Become the Latest Marketing Tool or is the Global Recognition of the Practise Exactly What We Need? [online] (accessed on 24th May 2020) https://www.dazeddigital.com/beauty/soul/article/44463/1/ commodification-self-care-good-thing