Branding, Labeling, and Peer Pressure in Teen Marketing

Introduction: Consumers, Branding, and Psychological Susceptibility

Consumer purchases are made to satisfy a need — physical or psychological, business-related or for pleasure, imaginary or real. While no two consumers will ever have identical purchasing needs, desires, attitudes, priorities, or behaviors, particular consumers will tend to behave and spend similarly based on demographic factors such as gender, household income, occupation, hobbies and interests, age group, image consciousness, and susceptibility to peer pressure (Kanner & Kasser, October 2003; Toynee, 2004; Grimaldi, 2005). Moreover, it is a striking feature of contemporary American life that so many of today's consumers, of every age, increasingly believe that who they are has much to do with what they buy, own, and display to others. This, in a nutshell, is the underlying reason that branding and labeling of consumer products is both so successful and so consistently effective. All of this, however, is actually a direct effect of consumer marketing — especially marketing targeted explicitly at those consumers most susceptible to its psychological effects and inflated promises: young people and teenagers.

Increasingly, textbooks, websites, classes, seminars, conferences, keynote speeches, panel discussions, symposiums, and magazine and trade journal articles devote themselves to detailed analysis of how best to encourage — or, more accurately, manipulate — consumers to buy more of particular mass-marketed products. Many such endeavors are also increasingly devoted to better understanding, manipulating, and exploiting the buying preferences, pressures, and habits of teens in particular.

Weeks (October 28, 2004) reports, for example, that at the second annual "What Teens Want: Marketing to Teens Using Music, Movies and the Media," a two-day event held in Beverly Hills, California, the hotel was filled with keynote speakers and dialogues with top executives, direct feedback from teenagers, and panels all tackling critical niche marketing issues. Hosted by AdWeek, BrandWeek, MediaWeek, Billboard, and The Hollywood Reporter, the event attracted media and marketing executives eager to understand the dynamic generation of current teens, who in the prior year had spent over $170 billion.

Why Teens Are Prime Targets for Brand Marketing

Within such settings, one fact that emerges again and again is that the labeling or branding of products has been proven to be especially effective with consumers of all ages, but with teen purchasers in particular. Product branding has also been proven to be far more effective at continually influencing teen buying decisions than at influencing the buying decisions of older consumer groups (Linn, May 2004; Kersting, June 2004; Grimaldi, 2005).

Most likely, this is because teenagers are in general far more susceptible than older consumers to the psychological and emotional effects of branding or labeling of products or services — whether designer clothes, cosmetics, cars, computers, music, food and drinks, appliances, or Internet subscriptions (Linn; Kersting). Teenagers as a group are also, in general, far more interested than other age groups in both fitting in with and impressing members of their peer group. For those reasons, advertising has worked hard to successfully link the idea of teenage popularity and peer acceptance with possession of the "right" brands of designer clothes and accessories, appliances, music products, foods and beverages, automobiles, shoes, handbags, luggage, watches, jewelry, backpacks, computer equipment, video games, cosmetics, and sporting equipment, among many other product categories.

As Kanner & Kasser (October 2003) note, consuming brand-name products is so important to teens today that it affects virtually everything they think, say, and do — from the way they look and dress, to whom they associate with, to how and where they socialize, to how they interface with and view the rest of the world. As Kanner & Kasser further suggest, "It's the meta-message that you can solve all of life's problems by purchasing the right products that's having the most profound effect" (p. iii). Kersting adds that "By the time children reach their teens, a developmental stage when they're naturally insecure and searching for a personal identity, they've been taught that material possessions are what matter." According to Linn (2004), businesses in the U.S. target adolescents and children in terms of their everyday marketing strategies with an annual budget exceeding $15 billion — two and a half times what was spent for such purposes in 1992 — influencing more than $600 billion in spending by, or for, those age groups.

The Role of Peer Pressure in Teen Purchasing Decisions

Peer influence plays a very significant role in shaping teenage purchasing choices and therefore helps determine the marketing effectiveness of particular product labeling or branding. More than any other age group, teens are motivated, affected, and influenced by what their peer group thinks or might think (Kanner & Kasser, October 2003). Such peer and marketing influences combined very often lead teenagers to buy expensive designer clothes and other popular or trendy items in hopes of fitting in with their peer group, attracting admiration, and impressing — or generating envy among — their friends and peers.

Ironically, teens, an age group well-known for its characteristic rebellion against convention and authority and for expressing offbeat individuality, are in truth very conformist in this way. Product marketers are extremely quick — and eager — to exploit this unique, often difficult phase of human development for profit. Many companies have done so with enormous success, branding, labeling, and otherwise promoting their consumer goods in ways that falsely and implicitly promise to make their owners instantaneously "cool," accepted, sought after, envied, sexy, good-looking, and popular when wearing, listening to, driving, eating, drinking, or otherwise using them.

Advertisers also frequently cannibalize real-world creative aspects of popular culture in order to push their products to teens. Well-known examples include the use of hip-hop images and sounds in Sprite commercials and brand labeling of "extreme" skateboarding and related sporting equipment products. In terms of music advertising specifically: "There's never been more attention paid to a specific generation… This generation has a voracious appetite, and the record companies are happy to satiate it. Kids are being bombarded with more and more types of media designed for their demographic, with some marketing plans targeting 5-year-olds" (Gunderson, September 22, 2000).

Conclusion: Consumer Awareness and the Path Forward

Consumer marketing, by its very nature, is designed to be and must be profit-oriented in order for companies to survive. What is harmful about the way many products are marketed is that so many advertisers associate their products with an image or lifestyle far beyond what the product actually does or delivers. Older consumers usually know from experience to be skeptical of such tactics, while teenagers do not. Most unfortunate is that, with the teen years being so difficult anyway, teens motivated by advertising and peer pressure to buy certain items can sometimes sincerely hope or even expect that ownership will transform them.