Books
The cool hunters. Decca Aitkenhead on the corporate takeover of childhood
Published 14 April 2003
Branded
Alissa Quart Arrow, 288pp, £7.99
ISBN 0099458063
Why Are They So Weird?
Barbara Strauch Bloomsbury, 241pp, £10.99
Despite knowing what a bore other people's nostalgia can be, I still can't help sometimes mentioning that I was 12 years old before I ever heard of mascara. Or that I must have been in the sixth form before the phrase "designer label" became another way of saying "trendy". These odd memories sound rather adorable to me, and I am irrationally proud of them.
But more often than not, friends mistake them for confessions of embarrassment, if not evidence of actual deprivation. For their part, they cannot disguise their pride when they report that their children have turned - isn't this funny! - into baby fashionistas. Refusal to entertain any variety of jeans but Junior DKNY is apparently no longer an alarm bell, or even a nuisance, but a trophy for successful parenting. As a yet-to-be parent, this makes me a little nervous, and Branded is not a reassuring read.
The relationship between children and brands is examined in forensic detail by Alissa Quart, who gives a vivid account of a marketing offensive now being directed at teens and tweens - one which she claims has rendered modern adolescence unrecognisable from her own. You might wonder how a 30-year-old could plausibly discern a wholesale transformation in so short a time; or suspect that what has changed is only the speed at which yesterday's young become today's pessimists, gloomy with lament for some lost innocence. But those suspicions would be wrong in this case, for Quart is convincing. What is changing - and at the speed of lightning - she demonstrates is childhood.
Branded introduces us to girls like Amy, "trendspotters" or "teen insiders" recruited by major corporations to "tell them what's hot and what's not". Girls like Amy, 14, spend hours each week e-mailing their corporate contacts with suggestions about clothes, ads, magazines and so on. They also test products, contribute to focus groups, and promote products to their friends. Amy says her unpaid toil for corporate giants makes her feel "in the know" and empowered, a delusion encouraged by "cool hunters", the adults employed to extract information from these trendspotters.
"We act like friends and chit chat with them," explains one cool hunter. "It helps our work that teens define themselves by their possessions," adds another. "They will say, 'I am Sony, not Panasonic.' Their favourite question is, 'If Coke were a person, who would it be?'" Adolescent subversion is not a problem encountered by trendspotters, who report that teens are easy to bond with nowadays because they spend so little time with their own families, who are either breaking up or out at work.
In 1989, corporations spent about $600m on marketing to kids. In 1999, they spent 20 times that amount. One of Branded's most disturbing chapters features an "Annual Advertising and Promoting to Kids" conference in New York, where evangelical speakers declared, for example, that "media selection is a right [sic] of passage". At a "Kid Power" event held in London, brand managers were advised on how to get "past the gatekeeper" (mum and dad) and exploit "the real influence of pester power". Far from feeling any awkwardness about their mission, Quart observed, the marketing executives "believed the inculcation of brand awareness was up there in importance with teaching kids language skills".
Branding of children extends into most areas of life. New York bar mitzvahs and birthday parties are becoming competitively extravagant status symbols. Teen movies have left behind the melancholic "cinema of loneliness", epitomised by films such as The Outsiders, and embraced glossy makeover tales such as She's All That. Quart writes, "Anyone can turn into a popular girl or prom queen, the films say. All it takes is a full commitment to beauty convention and the high school brand economy."
She introduces us to high school students for whom even a university place is just another brand, albeit one of all-important status. The ambition of becoming a "Harvard man" or "Williams girl" is so urgent that many parents will secure the services of a personal tutor, at up to $500 an hour. "Packaging students," explains one tutor, so sought after that she has become a brand of sorts in herself, "is the name of the game." In addition, students must also have great bodies, hence what Quart calls "self-branding" - the stratospheric increase in teenage cosmetic surgery among girls, and use of special body-building supplements for teens by boys.
But teenage years do at least constitute a legitimate identity outside commerce - a stage biologically defined by hormones, and intended for separation and experimental independence. If this process is now achieved through forming a preference for Pepsi over Coke, so be it. Quart draws no major ethical distinction between branding a teenager and an eight-year-old tween, but tweens seem to be a much more sinister matter.
"Tweens" do not exist in the real world. Outside the lively imagination of marketing executives, no such category has ever been needed by nature, nor by society. So when parents marvel over their wondrously grown-up little eight-year-old, this is not quite the same thing as being impressed by a teenager's maturity. For example, video gaming did $9.4bn worth of business in 2001, and a crucial component of the industry is product placement deals. An enthusiast describes to Quart the impact of one game, "Pro Skater 3", on his younger brother and his friends. "Suddenly, these kids were like, 'I want that, I have to have that!'"
The eight-year-old's grasp of the subtleties at stake in one skateboard over another, or of the social catastrophe unleashed by making the wrong choice, are certainly amazing, but probably grounds for serious concern. But tween marketing is so sophisticated that it can even fool parents into thinking it normal and healthy for young children to think this way.
The mystery of why older children, in their teens, tend to think in wildly chaotic ways was believed to have been solved with the discovery of hormones. Adrift in a hormonal storm, teenagers are generally expected to be weird until everything settles down. But in Why Are They So Weird?, Barbara Strauch proposes a radically new explanation. Scientists had previously believed that the brain has finished growing by the age of eight or nine, but new research suggests that in fact it is busy growing right into the late teens. Strauch explores the theory that it is this which makes teenagers a little mad.
"The frontal lobes [are] one of the key areas research has found still under construction in adolescence," Strauch explains. "They are the part of the brain that helps us resist impulses, wait before spending all our money on clothes, stop before we yell regrettable things at well-meaning fathers and mothers." Other areas of teenage brain growth, according to Strauch, might account for everything from drug-taking to sleeping in until noon.
It's an ambitious thesis - not to mention an ambitious task, trying to conjure a lively read out of neurological research - and despite the author's valiant efforts, and a jaunty red jacket cover, this is an uphill read. If Strauch is right, the discovery of brain growth will indeed prove important. But it would be difficult to convince anyone that what goes on inside children's heads could compete with the rubbish being pumped in from outside.
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