What Do Teens Want?

How to market to teens is a growing issue given the size of the "echo boom" generation. So we asked our kids. We asked the experts. Finally, we asked teen idols Blink-182.

By David H. Freedman | 
 

I'm in a modestly upscale suburban mall, tagging along behind my 15-year-old daughter, Rachel, and two of her friends. Striding forward in a way that is at once jaded and purposeful, the three girls dismiss most of the stores on first glance. "That store is for old people," explains one of them. Another store has "cool stuff" but is overpriced. Yet another has "good bargains," but it's too much work to find them in the sea of "junk" in which they're buried. The girls deign to stop in the Gap for a minute but roll their eyes at a young salesperson's suggestion that capri pants are hot. "Sure, if you want to look like you're trying to be trendy," says one of them, mercifully out of earshot of the perfectly helpful Gap employee. Back in the mall corridor, I veer toward the telescopes in the Discovery Channel Store but find the girls staring after me in horror. "I would never -- ever -- set foot in that store of my own free will," says one.

In five years, some 25 million U.S. teenagers will be roaming malls, downtowns, and Web sites. They'll be a free-spending bunch if today's teens are any guide. According to Teenage Research Unlimited, teens now spend an average of $100 a week, and last year they spent a total of $153 billion -- a number that's been growing at 6% a year. Forget about baby boomers; from here on out, Generation Y is the market to crack.

Unfortunately, most of us feel we'd have a better chance of achieving a breakthrough in quantum gravity than we would of figuring out how to reliably connect with teenagers. As tens of millions of Americans are discovering, even being the parent of a teenager doesn't exactly lift the veil on the teenage code. On the contrary, if the average teenager seems mysterious and somewhat aloof, your own teenager seems to be channeling on an intergalactic level. (Outside my home I have to remind myself to answer to names other than "Dork" and "Loser.") What chance do businesses have?

That's a question for the experts. Fortunately, I tracked down two who nicely filled the bill.

A mosh pit is the squash-court-sized cleared area in front of the stage at a rock concert where seemingly crazed concertgoers hurl themselves at one another. It looks like a life-or-death rugby scrum, except that bystanders are fair game. I could have sworn I was a safe 15 feet away from the pit at this concert, but its boundaries have apparently crept through the crowd to envelop me. I can feel the vibration in my teeth from the nearby impact of bodies.

Turning into the crowd behind me in my struggle to move away, I bump into an 18-year-old built like a professional wrestler. He has a girl on his shoulders, who, I am mortified to observe, is taking off her top. I have the feeling that I'm going to be simultaneously arrested and crushed to death.

What on earth am I doing here? Well, I am seeking the counsel of the two men who are onstage 100 feet away, guitars slung jauntily to the side as they take a break between songs. At the moment, one of them is spitting a stream of water -- I'd like to think it's water -- high into the air; the other has picked up a bra that a fan threw onstage by way of tribute and has fastened it around his face to produce a surprisingly good imitation of a housefly.

Meet Blink-182. They have agreed to answer for me one of the greatest questions facing the business world today: What do teens want?

If anyone could wring a profit from the sort of behavior I witnessed in the mall, it would be Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge. After all, a significant portion of the world's teens have already accorded them demigod status, not to mention a big chunk of their allowances. Hoppus and DeLonge are the two founders and lead performers of Blink-182, the pop-punk trio whose recent CD, Enema of the State, is approaching the 5 million mark in sales. Both are also enthusiastic and ambitious entrepreneurs. Besides having played an active role in painstakingly building Blink's business side (think major concert concession sales) and managing other bands, the two have founded a popular clothing and accessories Web business called Loserkids.com. Started with a onetime investment of $20,000 from the two, Loserkids has reinvested its profits to grow its inventory to be worth $500,000. (Third band member Travis Barker, a relatively recent addition to the group, owns a leather goods and accessories store in Riverside, Calif.)

Hoppus is a perpetually wide-eyed and slyly grinning 28-year-old who favors ankle-length cargo pants worn low enough to show off his colorful boxer shorts. The amiable and slightly laconic DeLonge, 24, sports tattoos up and down one arm, a lip ring, and a baseball cap worn backwards, with dyed hair sticking out from underneath it. I spent the better part of a day with them at Hoppus's spacious new home overlooking a softball field in a tony San Diego suburb. When Hoppus wasn't directing workmen or joining DeLonge in taking part in an apparently endless stream of brief on-air phone interviews with disc jockeys or discussing tax-reduction and life-insurance strategies with their advisers, the two provided some rules of thumb for relating to teens, in malls and elsewhere.

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    • David H. Freedman

    A Boston-based contributing editor, Freedman is the co-author of A Perfect Mess, which examines the useful role of disorder in daily life, business, and science. His other books include Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines; At Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion (co-authored with Charles C. Mann); and Brainmakers: How Scientists are Moving Beyond Computers to Create a Rival to the Human Brain.


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