Pre-teen segment drives popular culture

The tween girl – a demographic covering roughly the ages nine to 12 – is a driving element of popular culture today, just as the teenager was a generation ago.

That status – trumpeted by the marketing, advertising and media industries – is the result of the tweens’ buying power as budding consumers. And it’s leading marketers to seek to push its limits – for example by identifying six-year-old girls as “pre-tweens” in the hope of creating a new marketing niche.

Natalie Coulter, a doctoral candidate at Simon Fraser University, will be presenting the results of her research into the tween market at Congress 2009.  She says the power of the tweens resides not only in the fact that marketers have identified them, but also that they are a real demographic with identifiable behaviour.

Coulter says after the yuppies – young urban professionals – were identified as an active demographic in the 1980s, there was a rush to find “the next hot niche” that could be successfully targeted by marketers. Most attempts failed because the groups identified were artificial constructs that did not behave as a group in a predictable way.

But tweens, she says, are a real group, with real money to spend.

They have money for several reasons: Families have fewer children than they used to and therefore spend more on each individual child; working mothers spend more on their children than stay-at-home moms; and grandparents are living longer and, having few grandchildren, are inclined to spend lavishly on them.

And marketing, advertising and the media, realizing the tween girls were “a hidden gold mine,” suddenly became interested in them and speaking directly to them. Young girls, who previously had been ignored, became drivers of popular culture. For example Coulter says even women’s fashion today is influenced by the tween market.

So what are the boys aged nine to 12 doing while marketers target their sisters?

They are staying at home playing video games, says Coulter, who explains that the different shopping behaviour of men and women is a final factor that helped create the tween market.

So the tween boys aren’t part of the consumer demographic. To reach them, she said, a lot of marketers simply target their mothers.