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Smart Strategies for Marketing to Teens

Teenagers worldwide recognize the Coca-Cola (www.cocacola.com) brand logo more often than any other, says Elissa Moses, author of The $100 Billion Allowance: Accessing the Global Teen Market. They also watch MTV (www.mtv.com) and worry about the future. They’re linked by issues such as their love of family and their rejection of tradition. But despite the enormous amount of similarities they share, when marketers want to reach them they must keep one thing in mind: Never generalize.

Though many similarities exist globally within this age group of 15- to 19-year-olds, what is important to one region may not be important to another, Moses says. She does recommend global marketing to teens, but she says that companies are too quick to assume that all teens are involved in the same types of activities. Dating, for example, an activity that many may think of as beginning in the teen years, is an issue for only 12 percent of teens in Vietnam, compared with 67 percent in Ukraine. According to Moses, the best marketers out there, like Coca-Cola, find a careful balance of macro and local marketing. And she believes television is a good way to do that. "I think of MTV as being a loudspeaker in a high school," Moses says. "If you want to reach teenagers overnight, you get on these music video channels, and you will reach the majority of them."

Now is the right time to reach them because of the enormous amount of money teens are spending. Worldwide averages range from a high of $50 a week in Norway to a low $4 a week in Vietnam. The United States falls somewhere in the middle with its teens spending approximately $38 a week. All of this money combined means that teenagers around the world are spending more than a billion dollars a year. And this doesn’t even include money they are helping to spend, such as when they give an opinion to their parents on a new car or computer. Sales &Marketing Management; July 31, 2000.