Here’s a fun word: tween. Tweens are 8- to 14-year-olds. And according to Martin Lindstrom, author of “BRANDchild: Insights into the minds of Today’s Global Kids: Understanding Their relationship with Brands,” they comprise a new type of audience. They are apparently an increasingly powerful and smart “consumer group;” they spent $300 billion, but influenced an astounding $1.88 trillion spent across the globe last year. They are different from previous generations in every way. They are more likely to have a friend on the other side of the world than in their own street, they think the TV remote is broken when they can’t find the cursor on the screen, they drop from existence when the battery in their cell phone is flat, and they know current brand images better than any advertising expert.
Alissa Quart apparently feels the same way. Author of “Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers,” she believes that Generation Y has grown up in the age of the brand, bombarded and defined by name products. ‘Branded’ “tracks the ways that American business is reducing teens to their lowest common denominator, threatening to sap them of individuality and imagination.”
And now we have “kid nabbing.” In the recent issue of Forbes, the magazine reports that Procter & Gamble has assembled a stealth sales force of teenagers—280,000 strong—to push products on friends and family. Roughly 1% of American teens are involved in this effort, aged 13-19, and according to the article, “all of them are enlisted by an arm of Procter & Gamble called Tremor. Their mission is to help companies plant information about their brands in living rooms, schools and other crevices that are difficult for corporate America to infiltrate. These kids deliver endorsements in school cafeterias, at sleepovers, by cell phone and by e-mail. They are being tapped to talk up just about everything, from movies to milk and motor oil—and they do it for free. What makes kids want to discuss company products? “It’s cool to know about stuff before other people,” says one of the kids involved. Oh, and they also get a lot of stuff for free.
For whatever reason P&G has kept many details about Tremor, created in 2001, under wraps until now. The article goes on to report that this “effort grows out of a profound dissatisfaction among advertisers with conventional media, particularly network TV. Audiences are fragmented, and ever more viewers are using devices like TiVo to zap commercials. Teens, in particular, are maddeningly difficult to reach and influence through advertising, even though they are a consumer powerhouse that will spend billions on products this year. When they do catch TV commercials or print ads, these jaded consumers often ignore the marketing message. Hence the emphasis on friendly chatter among peers to deliver targeted messages. “The mass-marketing model is dead,” says James Stengel, P&G’s global marketing officer. “This is the future.”
So what do you think? Is P&G being manipulative or clever (or both)? Is Alissa Quart a pessimist or an opportunist? Is this evil or brilliant or just plain fun? Should this bother us? And lastly, if you were asked to do something like this, would you?
tween isn't an odd word, we've been using it for years. thanks to macromedia. anyway..
well, this is interesting. I signed up for tremor a long time back (2001 i believe). don't remember why exactly. I'm not marketing this to my friends. not pushing this on my family. every once in a while they send me a CD with music, i burh the songs i like and throw out the CD (forgetting the bands that made the songs in the process) or they sent me coupons for pizza once and a bunch of coupons for friends. I got a free pizza out of the deal (first and last time I have ever eaten that brand.) interesting approach. but they forgot a few things.
"tweens" (or college students on my case) are lazy. many of the tremor bits require a lot of work: go tell friends, deliever this to your friends, fil out this survey. etc. with a demographic like tweens, commands are not the best way to get them to market for you.
and if the growth of p2p services has taught us anything it's that teens (notice the lack of the "w") have a distaste for so openly being used by a comapany. yes, they wear abercrombie and eat at Mcdonalds, but if Mcdonalds asked them to tell 10 friends about their new McCattle and hand out coupons it would be a tough sell.
and reason 3. most of the tremor stuff sucks. biker boyz? Doesn't matter that it's marked at tweens, it looked like it would suck anyway.
On Jan.27.2004 at 02:36 PM