Marketing to Teenagers

The Next Generation: Marketing to Teenagers

Design Spike, http://designspike.com/the-next-generation-marketing-to-teenagers

Laura DL Bracken

Laura DL Bracken refers to those born between 1980-2000 as the generation “Y” or America’s youth. Teenagers today are different from teenagers in the past. This is mostly due to technology. Teenagers are technology savvy and spend most of their free time on computers, playing video games, listening to iPods, and anything else technology wise. Bracken explains that in order to reach teenagers requires a great deal of knowledge from research and analyzing trends. Teenagers are a difficult audience to reach and understand, but they are the market influencers. They decide what style is and what is not. Teenagers influence the groceries that parents purchase and even the clothes parents wear; therefore, understanding teenagers is highly important in marketing product and services. The article talks about using cross-media synergies to get the message across. Another way to reach teenagers is to become hip and market the product/service in a cool way because that will appeal to teenagers, and lastly, free, teenagers like free stuff and that will attract teenagers.

In order to reach a marketing audience, the buying behavior of that audience should be defined and researched. Why do consumers make those purchases? Teenagers make most purchases because they are the “cool” and latest thing. A company needs to study the what, why, and how consumers make decisions to purchase. For teenager’s external influence are the culture, their friends, Hollywood, and the internal influences blend in the external influences. Their attitudes, personalities, and knowledge are all influenced by external influences. Understanding teenagers and how they decide how to make purchases and what factors are responsible for that decision will determine the success of a marketing plan.