Seen by tweens

Editor’s note: Martin Lindstrom is CEO of the MartinLindstrom.com Group, an Australia-based consulting firm.

Tweens (kids aged from eight to 14) are described as the “richest generation” and most influential generation in history. Their nations are, so far, not at war. There’s an endless variety of disposable goods and leisure products designed specifically for them. They’re sophisticated consumers, and thus they’re a marketer’s dream. But the marketer’s dream has an ugly side - and this flipside is more akin to a nightmare.

These are the facts. An average child in the United States, Australia and the U.K. sees between 20,000-40,000 commercials a year (Leonhardt and Kerwi). According to a study done in 1999 by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, children spend 60 percent more time watching television each year than they spend in school. Children’s financial spending has roughly doubled every 10 years over the past three decades. Today the tween segment alone is estimated to control and influence an astounding $1.18 trillion per year via its pocket money and its general influence on their parents’ purchasing decision. And this is exactly where this generation differs the most from previous generations - their ability to influence their parents to a degree never seen before.

Three aspects of this generation make them extremely interesting. First, this is a very rich generation - with considerable financial potential and an ability to persuade their parents. Studying tweens across 11 countries we have learned that in most countries including the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Germany and Northern Europe, tweens have developed highly persuasive skills. They have well-planned arguments to help ensure that family purchases go their way.

This leads to my second point: tweens affect their parents’ brand choices - even when the brand is aimed at the parents. The BRANDchild study reveals that in up to 80 percent of all brand choices, tweens control the final decision. Even when it comes to the choice of a car, more than 60 percent of all tweens had a substantial influence on the final decision. (BRANDchild is a study of tween attitudes and behaviors, conducted by Millward Brown, which involved surveying several thousand kids from more than 70 cities in 15 countries throughout Europe, Asia, the United States and South America.)

The third aspect refers to the cradle-to-grave phenomenon. At six months of age, a baby begins imitating simple sounds like “ma-ma.” Studies show that they also form mental images of corporate logos and mascots. Dr. James U. McNeal, an expert on kids and marketing, estimates that brand loyalty can be influenced from about the age of two, when babies begin forming mental pictures of corporate logos and mascots. Children as young as three can recognize brand logos, and experts say that each lifetime consumer may be worth $100,000 to a retailer, making effective cradle-to-grave strategies extremely valuable.

Based on the BRANDchild study of tweens and their relationship to brands, some interesting findings have emerged to shed light on some of the dos and don’ts when it comes to marketing to this generation.

The 24/7 brand

The major difference between today’s tweens and those of yesteryear is that today’s tweens no longer expect to be informed by traditional media. The purpose of television commercials is no longer to communicate product details to tweens. Today they simply aim to inspire. Once the inspiration has kicked in, then ideally the brand will become interactive as there will be other channels that will do the informing. Tweens will seek more information about the brand on the channels that are available to them around the clock.

Forget the days where a brand closed down at 5 p.m. and reopened at 9 a.m. If your brand truly wants to talk to today’s tweens it will need to focus its operations around the life of tweens - not traditional business routines. This audience might very well be most affected by communication between 2:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. Monday to Friday - and then at any given hour on weekends.

Tween hours tend to peak at the same time as the peak hours for television commercials. This is when the chat room dialogues are running hot, and events are happening. So it’s very important for companies to be operating simultaneously because this is the instant generation, and if they hear of something new and exciting then they want it to be accessible.

If the most important brand dialogue time is considered to be Sunday, well then the head office marketing department should be there to monitor the action. So first and foremost, operating hours need to change to accommodate the audience. And this is an audience that expects its brands to be available 24/7.

Fish streaming

There is a new trend amongst tweens. I call it fish streaming. Let me explain. How would you persuade a stream of fish to swim in a certain direction? Would you target the leader of the crowd? If so, who would that be? Tweens are in some ways similar - not one but several tweens, interlinked, decide the direction, the brand preferences and trends, and so take the lead. Notions of individual brand loyalty don’t exist any more. If the group decides to boycott a brand, no individual loyalty would be strong enough to go against it.

However the complex set of dynamics doesn’t stop here. A tween fish stream involves much more than targeting tweens in one particular geographic area, because the true influence can extend to the other side of the world. One only needs to look as far as Pokèmon to get a good idea of the reach. When Pokèmon was first launched in Japan, it was increasingly clear to Nintendo that the characters - their names and their roles - had to be dramatically adjusted to the U.S. market. The BRANDchild study in fact shows that 25 percent of all tweens communicate with other tweens beyond their national boundaries every week. We also learned from the study that international impulses clearly are more attractive and influential to tweens than trends coming from home.

The introduction of Yu-Gi-Oh! shows how important international trends are. The game is in many ways similar to Pokèmon or Dungeons and Dragons, but by now many U.S. tweens had already discovered it, long before it was actually launched. They’d already taken advantage of the proliferation of Web sites dedicated to informing tweens about current Japanese trends. As a result, kids had already familiarized themselves with the characters learning from their friends in Japan.

Branding as religion

The role of religion is most likely going to be even more influential when marketing future brands towards tweens. Since September 11, the Bible as been on the Lycos list as the 50th-most-searched-for term. The movement towards religion not only offline but also online cannot be ignored. The Internet is a major purveyor of spiritual expression at a time when spiritual hunger is growing in the West.

One of the crazes that swept the Net didn’t involve video games, music downloads, geek jokes, dancing babies or cracker codes - it involved God. Millions flocked to www.reata.org, a homespun site run by Reata Strickland, a Tuscaloosa, Ala., Sunday school teacher who took a short, anonymously written “Interview with God” and set it to Shockwave animation. An example: God is asked what’s most surprising about humankind. God answers: “That they get bored with childhood. They rush to grow up and then long to be children again. That they lose their health to make money and then lose their money to restore their health.”

According to Jupiter Media Metrix, 2.4 million people visit the site each month. And all of this attention is happening by word of mouth. There has not been a single advertisement for the site, it’s barely rated a mention in the media and all the while Strickland is trying to figure out how she can pay for the cost of 40 gigabytes of bandwidth a day - the t-shirt, mouse pad and screensaver sales are only just managing to keep her afloat.

The site’s popularity comes at a time when Christian-themed entertainment is playing an increasingly central role in mainstream culture. The apocalyptic Left Behind products have sold more than 40 million copies and continue to be a national phenomenon. Parents have so far bought over 22 million copies of the Christian-based children’s videos Veggie Tales. And according to a Newsweek cover story, “Jesus Rocks,” contemporary Christian albums sold more in 2002 than jazz, classical and New Age genres combined.

The BRANDchild study shows that more than a year after September 11, 56.1 percent of all tweens across the globe found the word “religion” important - with U.S. (76.6 percent) and Brazilian tweens (78.8 percent) expressing the most reverence for the word. Given the widespread anti-God message that has existed in recent history in China, it’s not surprising that only 20.7 percent of all Chinese tweens considered religion important.

The Nordic Youth Research Organization released the results of a study on civic participation among young people in Europe in 2000. It reveals that over the past nine years, active church membership was the fastest-growing trend among tweens. It goes on to state that there’s been a fivefold increase in church memberships in central-western Europe and north-western Europe. In south-western Europe, this has increased tenfold.

What’s the concrete result of all this? Well first of all your branding needs to reflect trust, it needs to sell a spirit and needs to reflect a bigger picture. The days where one single product could take the world by storm are long gone. Today we are talking about tween concepts - representing a raft of products fulfilling several different needs, all represented by one brand. Pokèmon, Ninja Turtles, Harry Potter…you name it. They’ve all succeeded because they spread their wings in such way that they almost became a “mini religion” - a belief the tweens could admire.

1-800-PROVEIT

This is a no-BS generation. Tweens put a premium on straight talk and are drawn to brands which display utter confidence and offer full-on accountability. Given the many corporate collapses, the “grown-up” world has hardly proved to be a role model of honesty and transparency. But in light of this, the emerging trend clearly leans towards straight talk.

Procter & Gamble is a huge company which has launched several campaigns based precisely on this straight-talk philosophy. Their Old Spice High Endurance deodorant put its reputation on the line with a money-back guarantee and an invitation to phone 1-800-PROVEIT. The tweens love it - and they’ve embraced the brand and the product.

However this is also a generation which loves irony. A brand that so much as hints at feelings of self-importance will secure itself a permanent space in the tween-product graveyard. However the opposite attitude could provide just the ticket to brand stardom. A sense of irony is definitely the way to this generation’s heart. Tweens hate brands that take themselves too seriously, but embrace those that are able to have a laugh at themselves.

The Yoo-hoo Chocolate Beverage Corp. is not afraid to make fun of itself by sending a garbage truck painted in the brand’s signature yellow and blue to hand out samples of its chocolate milk. The man behind the drink, the top flavor guru, is Dr. Yoo-hoo, who’s introduced as “The Tsar of Tastiness! The Sultan of Scrumptiousness! The Maharaja of Mmmmm.”

On the Yoo-hoo site you can download wallpaper of Dr. Yoo-hoo’s picture and it’s of a quality that can hardly be called professional. You can also sneak a peek of the secret formula that goes to create the Yoo-hoo drink…but be warned: the sneaked peek is of a picture of Dr. Yahoo standing in front of a safe!

When Yoo-hoo mounted its Stinkin’ Summer Tour tweens flocked to hear groups like Blink-182 and listen to “the gospel of Hoo.” So the whole tour managed to integrate the message and the brand, and needless to say the tweens were drinking Yoo-hoo in “every town, parish and raging metropolis” across the United States.

Reviewing product placement

The BRANDchild study has confirmed what we have long suspected about the ongoing questions relating to product placement. Based on the qualitative segment of the research, we learned that rather than looking to traditional media, tweens take their brand cues from how the brand actually performs in various communities. Interestingly, we learned that product placement is the largest and most influential form of endorsement influencing tween brands. In almost all our group studies we learned that a substantial part of tween brand perception is either built on a general opinion within the tween community or is the result of product placement seen on television programs like MTV Cribs - where several products seem to grow their brand equity.

From a parent’s point of view the good news is that tweens have no trouble separating the commercial from the editorial content. The bad news is that we will probably be seeing an increasing blend of ad and content. When the movie Blade Runner, adapted from a Philip K. Dick novel, was released, it featured huge neon ads for numerous big corporations. Twenty years later, Minority Report, another adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story, included product placements of 30 brands. The James Bond movie Die Another Day has been nicknamed Buy Another Day by some because it contains product placements worth $100 million.

The merger between entertainment and advertising is likely to grow even stronger as industries touch all bases in their attempts to reach tweens Product placement will soon become as commonplace on computer games and mobile phones as it already is in most Hollywood movies. For a generation who’s used to a total separation between these two worlds it sounds horrifying. But, as long as brands stick to the truth and fully acknowledge a commercial payment is part of the deal, they will succeed.

I’ll go further and venture to say that hardly a tween brand will survive in the future unless they include elements of product placement in their strategy. It will never be the driving marketing vehicle, but there’s no doubt that product placement and establishing an online presence will become a vital element in launching a brand aimed at a tween market.

So where does all this leave the tweens…and us? It is clear that what we learned about tweens only 10 years ago is now significantly out of date. Brands will become increasingly digital. They will involve electronic screens, pocket computers, mobile phones and personal computers - they will work across multiple platforms - targeting tweens across multiple dimensions. Merchandising opportunities have taken center stage, and brands straddle online and offline worlds. In fact this bridge that brands create helps secure the life of a product so that it can extend beyond the three-month average for any fad.

Tweens have become the most influential brand gatekeepers - so as you develop your marketing plan and define your audience, bear in mind it’s no longer just simply child’s play!