Getting taken:
What you and your teens need to know about marketing (Part 1)
By Walt Mueller
Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series. Part 2 can be read here.
I was a fly on the wall, but it was getting hard to hide. After years and years of monitoring and analyzing marketers’ advertising efforts to children and teens, I finally decided to step right into the eye of the youth marketing hurricane. It was difficult to hide because I was one of only 300 people who had traveled to the Disney Yacht Club in Orlando for the annual Kid Power marketing conference.1 As I looked down the list of attendees, I quickly discovered that this was a who’s who of marketing, with representatives from a variety of companies that market their products to kids. All of them were looking to—according to the conference brochure—“increase revenue by forecasting and capitalizing on kid trends.” The conference’s own marketing material promised to help them all become more effective at selling to kids between the ages of two and 12. Not surprisingly, much of what I heard focused on selling to kids from the minute they emerge from the womb. My three days at the conference were eye-opening, so much so, that I determined to return and inform parents and youth workers of the deliberate, powerful and life-shaping role that marketing plays in today’s youth culture.
Having grown up as a baby-boomer born in 1956, marketing was a big part of my world. Like most kids, I watched lots and lots of television, particularly the Saturday morning lineup of cartoons. Saturday morning TV fare also included lots of commercials hyping the latest and greatest toys, food, clothing and a host of other items created—I believed—just for me. In fact, my assumption was correct. But little did I know that the advertisers had their fiscal interests rather than my best interests in mind.
The advertising in my world made my mother’s trips to the grocery store difficult, especially when one or all three of her boys went along for the ride. I remember the aisles being long, narrow tunnels lined with sensory overload. For me, no aisle was more exciting than the one with breakfast cereals. Spotting the boxes of Captain Crunch and seeing the Captain’s picture on the box was like running into a friend. I remember begging my mom to buy me a box. I begged especially hard when the box contained a “free” Bosun’s whistle that would allow me to be more like Captain Crunch himself. Having seen the “free” whistle advertised on TV had me planning my mission to get Mom to purchase a box of Captain Crunch long before we ever set foot in the store. Watching all those commercials actually turned me into a marketer of sorts.
I also remember how three little guys named Snap, Crackle and Pop made a bowl of Rice Krispies a childhood treat for the simple reason that adding milk turned the relatively tasteless and boring cereal into an auditory experience. The cereal aisle also was where I ran into the familiar “silly rabbit,” a little leprechaun and his “magically delicious” mix of cereal and colorful marshmallows, and a tiger who had told me countless times that his Frosted Flakes were “greeaaat!”
I also remember how powerful television was in shaping my opinion on athletic shoes, or “sneaks” as we used to call them. As an active boy, footwear was important to me. Unfortunately, my parents’ thriftiness, combined with my ability to wear out a pair of sneaks in no time (yes, I used my sneakers to corner and brake while riding my bike), left me wearing Sears and Roebuck “three for” sale price shoes—a brand and style that I had never seen advertised on the tube and wasn’t at all popular with my peers. But I’ll never forget the big day when my parents generously purchased a pair of PF Flyers, sneakers I had long-coveted since commercials had convinced me that they would make me “run faster and jump higher.” Being one of the youngest and slowest boys in the neighborhood, I couldn’t wait to try them out on one of our many driveway basketball courts. I distinctly remember wearing my new PF Flyers home from the store on a rainy afternoon. Unable to test my running and jumping ability outdoors, I settled for several minutes of running and jumping across the tiled kitchen floor. Sadly, when I finally got outside looking and feeling cooler than ever before, I was still one of the slowest kids in the neighborhood.
During my lifetime, there has always been marketing aimed at children and teens. And, it’s always worked. But something is markedly different about advertising today. A host of cultural factors has contributed to the growth in both size and effectiveness of these marketing efforts, creating a situation where marketing has become a powerful molder and shaper of the values, attitudes and behaviors of kids from the moment they are born. For years I’ve been convinced that media has become the most powerful life-shaping institution in the world of children and teens. I’ve also believed that music has served as the most powerful of all life-shaping media outlets. But after observing changes in the music and advertising industries over the course of the past few years, I’m increasingly convinced that balance of power has shifted and advertising has eclipsed music as the most powerful media force in today’s youth culture.
I’m also convinced that at its root, advertising is worth our intentional and diligent attention because when you get right down to it, it’s a spiritual issue. How? Because of our sinful and fallen human nature, we have been cut off from our created purpose to be in relationship with our Creator. What has resulted from this brokenness is a constant and gnawing hunger and cry for redemption and restoration. We are empty until the hole in our soul is filled by a relationship with God through his son Jesus Christ and we are living under the rule and reign of God. Marketing plays into and exploits that emptiness and yearning by promising redemption, fulfillment, wholeness and satisfaction through the purchase and use of products. In effect, marketing substitutes a false gospel for the true gospel. If we believe marketing’s promises to deliver—promises that in fact never can deliver—we run the risk of falling into the endless cycle of believing the lies and buying product after product in the hope that somehow, this time, we will be fulfilled.
As a result, marketing is especially powerful in the lives of our teens. The teenage years are characterized by change. Because the change brings confusion, kids spend time wondering where the changes taking place in their lives are going to end. And, they wonder if the ending for them will yield something that leads to their acceptance by others. Consequently, the teenage years are marked by an insecurity that leads to them being easily influenced if an influence promises to help them fulfill their hopes, dreams and emptiness. In other words, teenagers are perfect targets for the marketing machine.
This reality hit home a few years ago when I was a guest on a televised talk show. As I sat offstage waiting my turn, I watched and listened as another guest was interviewed by the host. The guest was now a writer and motivational speaker, but before pursuing this career path she had been a marketing executive who headed up the advertising campaigns for a well-known fast-food chain. While going over her bio, the curious host asked her, “I see you once worked in marketing. Tell me, how does one go about starting a marketing campaign to sell hamburgers to kids?” Without hesitation the guest answered, “We’ve taken a page from Satan’s book. Find a point of weakness and lust in every man, woman and child, and target that weakness to make them want to buy a product.”
Those who market to children and teens know these strategies well. It’s been interesting to meet the movers and shakers in the youth marketing industry. They are almost exclusively very young, driven and energetic. Barely out of their teen years themselves, they’re people who are incredibly committed to and aggressive in their efforts to earn their share of the youth dollar. Part of my functioning as a fly on the wall at the
We’ve already mentioned how marketing taps into our spiritual emptiness, promising redemptive fulfillment, never fulfilling, but continually convincing us that the answer’s out there if we just keep grabbing and spending. It’s a vicious cycle. Add to that the fact that our culture (and our teens) is increasingly more and more materialistic, and we are more prone to buy into advertising’s empty promises of salvation. Over the course of time, these cultural realities have served to feed and increase marketing’s power and will most likely continue to do so for a long, long time.
“We’ll get you ...”
Marketing strategies and terms
Because marketing is so pervasive and powerful in today’s culture, those who love and minister to kids need to be aware of the many advertising strategies marketers employ in an effort to influence children and teens’ spending decisions, or “be taken.” By knowing how advertisers and advertising works, we are better equipped to help kids understand marketing and how they are manipulated and influenced. Then, we can equip them to think Christianly about marketing in a manner that allows them to resist when necessary. I believe that one of the most important steps we can take in leading our kids to a deep and life-shaping faith is to train them in skills that will put them on the road to being discipled and shaped by Christ, rather than being discipled and shaped by advertising.
Remember, every advertisement we see is carefully calculated regarding message, method and placement. There is nothing haphazard. Rather, everything is deliberate. Behind every minute of advertising lies hundreds of hours of market research and strategizing. The following strategies, techniques and terms are all part of today’s deliberate marketing landscape. I’ve placed them in no particular order and the list is far from exhaustive. As you read through each, think of examples that you and your children have encountered in your recent daily interactions with advertising.
Age aspiration
“Stop treating me like a child!” How many parents have heard their teens speak—or yell—those words? Adolescence is the bridge between childhood and adulthood and our kids want to get there fast. Marketers are well aware of the fact that children and teens want to feel, look, be perceived and be treated as older than they really are. As a result, market research has been done to discover what ages different-aged children and teens aspire to be. Market researcher Peter Zollo says “the gap between how old teens are and how old they would like to be narrows steadily as they age.”2 Research shows that 12- and 13-year-olds aspire to be 17, 14- and 15-year-olds aspire to be 18, 16-year-olds aspire to be 19, and 17- to 19-year-olds aspire to be 20.3 Marketers consider age aspiration as they create ads that reach the targeted age by catering to the aspired age. In effect, marketers exploit a young person’s desire to grow up.
The formula holds true for children under 12 as well. Because young children look up to older children, ads for products targeting younger children will often feature older children using and enjoying the product. Consequently, young children see the product as sophisticated and grown up.
Cigarette and alcohol companies have employed this strategy for years. By picturing young adults in situations where they are smoking, drinking and having fun, youthful viewers are led to believe that smoking and drinking are signs of being grown up. Marketing critic Susan Linn says “many of the models I’ve seen in beer commercials look young enough to be under 21. The themes or stories portrayed in some alcohol commercials seem more relevant to underage drinkers than anyone else.”4
Magazines—particularly those targeting teenaged girls—employ the strategy as well. Seventeen magazine might be read by some 17-year-olds, but you can be sure younger teens are drawn to the magazine because of age aspiration. The magazine’s editors and advertisers are fully aware of this fact. Seventeen-year-olds are typically drawn to magazines like Cosmopolitan that target young women.
Age compression
A similar and related marketing phenomenon is age compression. This strategy for expanding a product’s market by pushing adult-type products, values and attitudes on kids at younger and younger ages both assumes and creates an environment where what used to be for 18-year-olds is now for six-year-olds. As a result, today’s six-year-olds are looking, dressing, talking and acting like yesterday’s 18-year-olds.
One of the direct effects of this strategy is the marketing of sex and sexiness to young children. For example, one popular ad for Candie’s shoes and accessories featured pop star Ashlee Simpson—popular especially among pre-teens—seductively posing on a bed while wearing a revealing Teddy top. When the ad was shown to preteen boys and girls, the girls noticed Simpson’s shoes, her outfit and the stuffed animal in the corner of the ad. The boys saw something entirely different. “’Damn she’s hot!’ says one. ‘Look how hot that girl is!’ ‘She has nice legs,’ one boy whispers to his friend. ‘She’s horny!’ another says with a giggle.”5 Juliet Schor notes how marketers turn this type of behavior around and interpret it as justification for marketing like this to kids. She writes, “Marketers have even coined an acronym to describe these developments. It’s KAGOY, which stands for Kids Are Getting Older Younger. The social trends become part of the license for treating kids as if they were adults.”6
Image aspiration
A more obvious marketing strategy that taps into a child’s aspirations is to reach the target audience by using and catering to their appearance desires, usually in terms of height, weight, body type, hair color, complexion, eye color, etc. Our body-conscious culture has this generation of children and teens looking in the mirror more than any other previous generation. When they don’t like what they see (which is usually always), it is because they are comparing themselves to a body image type or standard that they’ve seen over and over again through media’s many outlets. By placing “the beautiful people” in ads, marketers are then able to get kids to associate their product and its use with those who are good-looking models of what kids aspire to be.
Take a closer look at every ad and commercial you see. In almost every case, a well-above-average model(s) is used to promote products. The only exceptions are in cases where market research shows that using a more average looking person or a particular character type will result in a better connection with the target audience and yield greater sales.
Branding
Next time you find yourself in a room full of children or teens, take a look around the room. Look at what they’re wearing—on their feet, their bodies and their heads. Chances are you’ll see a variety of logos touting everything from clothing companies, to TV shows, to musical groups, to sports teams, to schools. We live in a “logofied” culture where we not only pay a company for their clothes, but we go so far as to pay them and then walk around as mobile billboards for their brand! Brands are important, especially to the emerging generations.
Branding is the process by which a brand catches the individual’s interest, is adopted by the individual as their own identity, and then becomes an integral part of their life and culture. In a peer-oriented culture where social status and acceptance is of the greatest importance, brands compete against each other for allegiance, knowing full-well that if they come out on top and make a broad connection, they’ve accomplished something that’s going to be economically profitable. Marketers have branded well when the brand is not only adopted by kids, but immediately recognizable. The Nike swoosh, McDonald’s Golden Arches and Adidas stripes are all examples of successful brands that have been adopted by kids.
In today’s world, the brand that is adopted is not just the product itself, but the product’s ethos as well. An early example of successful branding is a series of late ‘60s and early ‘70s commercials that depicted a variety of teenaged and young adult females leaving their guy to pursue “that neat guy in Levi’s slacks.” Adopting the brand and its ethos made male consumers “a neat guy” who was bound to get so much attention from females that he would be forced to run and hide. More recently, the Chrysler Corporation, a car brand that has been long identified with the elderly, began a campaign to re-brand themselves and capture younger customers by featuring former Chrysler ad icon Lee Iacocca playing golf with hip-hop icon Snoop Dogg.
Research shows that branding starts young, with kids able to recognize logos when they are only 18 months old. In addition, before they reach their second birthday “they’re asking for products by brand name. By three and half, experts say, children start to believe that brands communicate their personal qualities, for example, that they’re cool, or strong, or smart.”7 Alissa Quart notes that “once kids bought an article of branded clothing at a department store; now they buy an entire identity, a whole set of clothes by one manufacturer at that brand’s ersatz boutique. Kids become Prada girls or Old Navy chicks or Pacific Sun, a.k.a. PacSun boys—and even volunteer their services to these beloved brands to show the extent of their identification and devotion.”8
In our consumer-driven and materialistic culture, brands will come and go as companies posture and fight for brand supremacy. Keep an eye on the kids you know and the ads targeting them to gain a sense of which brands and what they stand for are most important in their lives.
Viral marketing
Also known as seeding, grassroots marketing, stealth marketing, guerilla marketing, word of mouth marketing, and buzz marketing, this practice originally became known as viral marketing when marketers began utilizing the Internet by entering into teen chat rooms and posing as teens themselves to praise and promote their products. Another form of this practice involves identifying some of the most popular kids in a particular student population, then giving them free products to give away in the hope that the brand will then spread like a highly contagious virus through the peer group. At times, marketers will actually pay kids to do the work, something that makes a young person feel privileged and important as they hold the coveted position of trendsetter. Some refer to these messengers as “product evangelists.” By using friends or marketers posing as faceless peers who plant marketing “seeds” in chat rooms, kids are marketed to without even knowing that’s what’s happening. Then, their adoption of the product and willingness to tell others fuels a marketing buzz.
I actually heard one marketer refer to this practice as “reaching teens in their natural habitats,” a term that somehow conjures up images of kids as animals. Promotional materials for the Youth Power 2006 conference advertised a seminar entitled “Connect with Youth Culture through immersive Guerilla Marketing Experiences.” The seminar description said the “session will cover how to effectively immerse brand with youth influencers, followers and hip parents through some of the latest guerilla marketing vehicles.”9
Viral marketing is used to promote everything imaginable from energy drinks, to fragrances, to footwear and clothing, to food, and to films. Examples of this type of marketing abound. Hires Root Beer employed the strategy in one of the earliest viral marketing efforts during the mid-1950s. The company would go into a community and choose a girl at the local high school to pitch the root beer to her classmates, school concession stand managers and drug/grocery stores in the community, telling them how great Hires Root Beer tasted and how much kids like it. The success of the hit-cult-teen film Napoleon Dynamite didn’t come through broadcast reviews or the film’s run in theaters. Instead, copies of the film were given to kids who watched it and then told others about it. Alcohol companies are known to pay people to sit in bars, order and drink their drink, and then talk about it to others who are there. In an effort to sell their male body spray to college students, Axe sent teams to college campuses and handed out thong underwear sporting the Axe Web site address. In addition, thongs were slipped into loaded yet unattended clothes dryers at campus laundromats.
The Girls Intelligence Agency is a Los Angeles-based marketing company that has developed the “Slumber Party in a Box” as a viral marketing tool. The “Slumber Party in a Box” is pitched to girls who visit the company’s Web site: “You and your 10 best buds hangin’ out all night with the hottest, yet-to-be-seen-in-stores stuff for chicas like you!” The girls are then asked to enter to win a chance to be a GIA slumber party host, something the girls covet as a privilege. What’s in the box? Products companies hope to create a buzz about in the youth culture. GIA markets solicits marketers this way: “40,000 secret agent influencers and their closest friends … Your product only, all night long … Behind enemy lines—GIA gets you into girls’ bedrooms.”10
Insiders
Marketers also rely on insiders to help them create products and then market them effectively to teens. Insiders are children or teens who advise marketers on how to appeal to him/her and his/her friends. Lots of companies and publications have set up “boards” composed of teenagers who offer input on fashion, trends, likes, dislikes, etc. When marketing campaigns are under construction, the reaction and feedback of insiders is sought. Adjustments to the campaign are made as a result of processing this feedback. Insiders are teens who not only share ideas, but they function as guinea pigs for the company and their products.
Adjacent attraction
Marketing critic Alissa Quart writes about how malls use adjacent attraction as a “marketing technique whereby the soothing light of a glass atrium or the seductive image of a pretty girl lures a teenager into buying an entirely unrelated pair of designer jeans … Customers … want things they have never wanted before, in part because of the nonsaleable objects and activities that are routinely juxtaposed with goods that are for sale. The environment creates a mood of ambiguity and anxiety that can be released only by buying.”11 This technique is especially effective with children and teens because of where they’re at developmentally and their impulsivity. The images employed typically draw kids to something they aspire to, including beauty, sex or friendship—or at times, all three.
One way for you to see how prevalent adjacent attraction is in advertising to teens is to peruse a magazine targeting teen girls. Look at where the products and the product’s name or logo are placed in the ad. In today’s world, their placement is oftentimes in a place of nonprevalence, as if the product itself is not that important. Instead, it is the adjacent object used (a beautiful person, a group of friends, etc.) to attract that is most prominent.
Eatertainment
This is a marketing strategy employed primarily with children, tweens and early teens that makes food look fun. For example, ads for chewy fruit snacks don’t only praise the food’s flavor, but shows the food’s fancy shapes and colors, promoting the food as something fun. An ad for
Susan Linn notes that while many of us grew up being told, “Don’t play with your food,” marketers now have another agenda. She quotes Quaker Oats Company spokesperson Lisa Piasecki: “It used to be [that] food marketers grabbed kids’ attention with packaging graphics and good taste. Kids today are so media-savvy, they want everything in life to be interactive, including their food. It has to have great taste, but it also needs to deliver entertainment value.”12
Magalogs and adverzines
Advertisers began tapping into youthful materialism and kids’ growing fascination with magazines in the mid to late 1990s by creating slick, magazine-like catalogs that contain some editorial content. Unlike magazines that are primarily editorial in nature with the additional inclusion of advertisements, magalogs and adverzines are first and foremost about peddling a company’s product as in a catalog. However, they include additional editorial content about the life issues the target group is facing (love, relationships, beauty tips, etc.) that makes them especially appealing to children and younger teens.
One of the most popular of all magalogs is the Delias catalog, which features copy and content on girl’s issues while selling products to meet those needs. Among older teens, the Abercrombie and Fitch A and F Quarterly is popular. This publication has typically featured good-looking models sporting the clothing while a loosely tied-together visual story is told as readers flip through the pages. I once heard it described by an Abercrombie and Fitch marketing exec as taking the place of Norman Rockwell’s paintings of
Advertorials
Many of the music magazines I regularly survey include photographic spreads featuring popular artists modeling clothing in a variety of settings. Sometimes the photo-essays communicate something about the artist’s life, favorite activities or a social interest that’s important to them. But when reading the fine print at the bottom or side of the page, it becomes obvious that the real purpose of the photo spread is to market the apparel featured in the layout. Readers are told where to purchase the featured clothes. Our kids can expect to increasingly encounter cleverly disguised magazine editorial content that is actually nothing more than an ad.
Dual messaging
Imagine for a minute you’re a marketer developing a plan to market your new breakfast cereal to children. The research shows that a large percentage of mothers who purchase cereal for their children want to be sure the cereal they feed their children is healthy and good for them. The children, on the other hand, want a cereal that’s not only tasty, but features colorful characters, an interactive box and something fun inside. In essence, what the research shows is that the desires of parent and child appear to be mutually exclusive. What’s the answer to your dilemma? Dual messaging. Since you have to reach both consumer groups with your product (mom has to want to buy it and the kids have to want to eat it), you use your ad to send a message both to parents and children. In other words, your ad tells viewers that the cereal is both fun and nutritious. If you take the time to really watch and listen to advertisements targeting children and teens, you’ll see how often dual messaging is employed as a strategy.
One classic example comes from the world of candy in 1954. That was the year M&M’S brand candy began to be sold on TV commercials with a message that targeted both mothers and children. Mom’s were concerned about the “chocolate mess” that was caused when a child’s body heat would melt the chocolate they held in their hands if they weren’t careful. Kids wanted the candy to be tasty and fun. The company came up with a dual message that met the concerns of both groups: “The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hands.”
Nag factor
Also known as pester power, this strategy has marketers encouraging kids to hound their parents for a particular product. In effect the strategy skillfully allies kids with marketers in a powerful joint force that puts lots of pressure on parents. I once heard a marketer refer to this as “empowering kids,” a phrase that somehow takes the hard edge off the strategy that seeks to get kids to nag their parents into buying things they otherwise wouldn’t even think about buying. Believe it or not, market researchers are working hard to figure out how to foster the nag factor.
Marketers even break it down into two types of nagging. Persistence nagging is repeating one’s case and plea over and over again. The more effective approach of importance nagging appeals to a parent’s desire to provide their children with the best. In addition, it’s especially effective where busy parents are feeling guilty about not spending enough time with their kids. Researchers estimate that children’s nagging results in up to 46 percent of sales among businesses that target children.13 Research also shows that among teenagers, the average amount of “asks” or “nags” needed before their parents give in to let them have what they want is nine.14
One recent and elaborate example of pester power and the nag factor was a Virgin Mobile campaign designed to help kids successfully pester their parents for a cell phone. The online campaign featured numerous downloads kids could use in their nagging efforts. Included were cards, posters and even an elaborate PowerPoint sales presentation for kids to show their parents.
Employ the cool factor
One of the most used and important strategies for parents to understand is the utilization of cool as a marketing technique. The ploy plays to peer pressure, the realities of adolescent social development, and a teen’s desire to fit in and not be left out. Cool is what’s most desirable at any given moment in time. It’s doing what everyone else is doing, but doing it first and doing it the best. It has worked best when the advertiser’s brand or product finds its place in the youth culture as the key to social success.
At times, it’s as simple as placing the word “cool” in an ad. But usually, it’s much more subtle than that. In his brilliant one-hour expose of marketing to children and teens, “The Merchants of Cool,” Douglass Rushkoff describes how important cool is in the teenage world. Marketers use cool hunters—very young and hip adults who go on shop-alongs and act like kids themselves … although they are actually spies—who work to uncover and identify the next cool thing so it can be co-opted, manufactured and mass marketed to children and teens.15
Youth marketing expert Peter Zollo lays out the results of his research on how cool works in his book Getting Wiser to Teens.16 His research is eye-opening for parents and youth workers. Zollo calls it the “Teen/Types Trend-Adoption Flow.” His work segments kids into four types or groups who function in a hierarchical relationship with each other.
The first group is known as Edge teens. This group comprises 11 percent of the teenaged population. Edge teens are fiercely independent and see themselves as outside the teen social strata. These kids are typically the disenfranchised outcasts who are edgy in dress, attitude and behavior. They are described as rebellious, reckless and always cool. They read Rolling Stone and Spin magazines to stay up on their music interests. They are perceived as having parents who don’t care. Consequently, they are raising themselves. When the cool hunters embark on their fact-finding missions, the edge teens are where they go. Trends usually start with these kids. In the past some of those trends have included skateboarding, piercings, tattoos, hair dye, fringe music, etc. Marketers monitor these kids to discover the latest new “edge” trends. Once they find an “edge” trend to market, they mass produce it and inject it into the mainstream of the youth population. Because this doesn’t sit well with edge teens, they label the larger population that has assimilated their culture as posers. The edge teens then abandon their style and trends and develop something else that keeps them on the edge—and then the whole cycle starts again. This cycle is a marketer’s dream!
Zollo’s second student group is the 10 percent of the population known as influencers. Membership in this group is highly sought after, but very exclusive. This is the most directly influential group on the student population. These are the kids that the “wannabes” want to be like. They rule the school because they are cool, but not edgy. They are big shoppers who are concerned with their appearance and they love fashion. They are outgoing, social and outwardly confident. Marketers often refer to them as “alpha kids” or “product evangelists.” This is the group that marketers target with the products and styles they’ve stolen from the edge kids. A press release announcing the launch of Blown Away Marketing described the marketing firm’s ability to influence and mobilize the influencers: “Blown Away Marketing has tremendous capabilities in getting trend-setting products to tastemakers across the country. With affiliate youth media groups in 66 major cities and college campuses in all 50 states, it is possible for them to put together a coordinated effort across the country.”17
The third group is known as the conformers. This is the largest of the four groups and it makes up 44 percent of the teen population. They are your typical teens. They adopt the fashions discovered among the edge teens that are popularized by the influencers. They seek out the latest styles and fads in order to make themselves feel more confident. Marketers love the conformers as they have the desire and the financial means to emulate edge and influencer teens. Marketers know that ad campaigns that promote “cool” products that promise solutions for teen problems connect with these kids effectively.
The final teen group is the 35 percent of the population known as passives. These are typically the academic achievers who struggle socially. They want to be popular and well-liked, but are too shy or scared to pursue these ends. Males outnumber females in this group 2:1. They do respond to marketing efforts. It just takes them a little longer to respond. They respond best to ads that offer relief from social stress.
When it comes to teens, cool has sold and continues to sell product—and marketers are working to get the manufacturing and marketing of cool down to a science.
Next time …
In the next installment of this two-part series on how marketers target youth, we’ll look at additional marketing strategies, along with some suggestions on how you can begin to temper and counter marketing’s powerful influence on the kids you know and love. Until then, resolve to become more aware of the marketing messages and strategies you encounter throughout the course of your day. Encourage your kids to do the same. Rather than assuming the passive position of mindless consumption of the advertising glut that fills your days, be intentional about assuming a posture of mindful critique. Begin by intentionally looking for and discussing together the ads that you see. Take another step in the right direction by processing what you’ve seen through the framework of God’s Word and a distinctively Christian world and life view.
Teaching students to consciously and continually think Christianly and critically about advertising is a valuable skill that fosters spiritual formation. By asking good questions, students will learn how to compare advertising’s messages and worldviews to the biblical world and life view. Not only will they learn more about advertising’s methods and power, but they will also see how the Scriptures speak to all of life.
This is the first in a two-part series. Part 2 can be read here.
For more information on resources to help you understand today’s rapidly changing youth culture, contact the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding.
©2007, The Center for Parent/Youth Understanding