Developing The Tween Market: A Quick History Lesson

The ruthlessness of companies marketing to children has always been fascinating to me. Having grown up pre-MKA, but with a sister who is 11 years younger and who was a huge fan of Full House and the post-Full House MKA empire, I have always been interested in the marketing that was directed at her (and other girls her age) as she grew up. A few years ago I did quite a bit of research on MKA and the development of the tween market - below is an excerpt from that article:

The profitability of children’s entertainment is nothing new to the American culture. Marketing to children, and the parents of young children, has been going on since the early half of the 20th century, when food and household-product companies used trade cards, storybooks and dolls, such as the Campbell Kids as entertainment and advertisement. Nora Odom Pecora, in her book The Business of Children’s Entertainment, further explains, “Initially, children were brought into the consumer movement to influence family purchasing behavior. By the late 1930’s, advertisers recognized that children were consumers in their own right.”

In the past few decades, children have come to be recognized as a multi-million dollar, barely tapped, and yet very powerful, consumer market. Jyotsna Kapur explains in her essay “Out of Control: Television and the Transformation of Childhood in Late Capitalism” that, “Since the 1960’s, there has been a subtle shift in the concept of childhood, the impact of which is only now fully apparent.” Connecting her point to child consumerism, Kapur goes on to quote a standard text on marketing to children that states:

"Do you know what successful companies like, Nike, Nabisco, Levi Strauss, McDonalds, Mattel and Nintendo all have in common? The answer is that they have brilliantly tapped into the needs, interests, fantasies and desires of a huge, powerful, and growing consumer market – kids! Marketing studies show that today’s generation of wise-beyond-their-years children have gained unprecedented influence over family purchases – from clothes…to cars…to computers. It’s a $120 billion market right now and the end is not yet in sight."

Additional complexity is added to the child consumer condition when one considers the shift that has happened in recent decades from stars selling products, to actually becoming products. Percora writes about this shift, explaining:

"Corporate America, in the form of advertisers and product manufacturers, and the children’s entertainment industry have long had a casual working relationship. However, over time, this relationship has changed from simple, contractual agreements between entertainment and manufacturing industries to more complex economic arrangements. Entertainment characters now not only sell goods but also are part and parcel of the product. No longer does Johnny ask mom to buy Ovaltine drink because Little Orphan Annie or Dick Tracy say so, now Johnny wants Batman cereal, a Looney Tunes frozen dinner, Sesame Street pasta shapes or Smurf yogurt. The entertainment personality has become the brand name."

For those marketing to the female tween audience, this “star as product” strategy is very powerful identification tool.

In her book on female spectatorship, Jackie Stacey explains that, “Towards the end of the 19th Century, changes in the organization of capitalism positioned women as the key subjects in commodity exchange.” Stacey goes on to reference Stuart Ewen who stated, “As the home increasingly became a place of consumption rather than production, it has been argued, women’s role within it was also transformed as they became managers of consumption.” This change also allowed advertisers to zero in on women as the major target audience for beauty and hygiene products. Any look at Photoplay issues from the early part of the 1900’s will confirm that marketing to women has long been directed towards women’s insecurities about appearance and aging.

With the emergence of the flapper in the 1920’s and the “teenager” in the 1930’s and 40’s advertising was able to focus its aim on a more specific, and possibly more consistently insecure, target audience. In the late 1940’s Estelle Ellis, the first promotional director at Seventeen Magazine, enticed advertisers to market to teenage readers of the magazine by declaring:

"Teena [the teenage girl archetype] means business—don’t pass her by. You can’t afford to overlook the high school girl…She’s an important girl and bound to be quite a woman. Sell her now—for now and the future—in the magazine she reads and believes—Seventeen."

Ultimately, advertisers came to rely on “Teena’s” dependence on consumer goods to sell their products. Increased ability to purchase, due to post-wartime prosperity, and the typical adolescent insecurities regarding both physical and emotional growing pains, added to the attractiveness of their demographic to advertisers peddling a variety of products, especially beauty goods and clothing.

Additionally, over the past few decades, critics have begun to note that capitalist expansion and new technologies of the 20th century have resulted in children dressing and behaving like adults, and consequently blurring the boundaries between adults and children. Since the 1990’s, tweens have been identified as those not given the independence allowed teenagers but who are already interested in the consumer goods and services available to teens. Tweens often spend Saturday afternoon at the mall but have to be home by dinner. Among the first products clearly marketed to this group were clothing and snack foods, but increasingly, corporations have begun to recognize tween girls’ greater purchasing potential, both current and future. Thus, the teen and female consumer markets, along with late 20th Century’s technological, economical and sociological changes of child “adultification,” led to the development of a “tween” consumer market.