Not Another Teen Marketing Study

An old review I penned in 2005, originally published by the in-house magazine of a large Filipino bookstore chain. There are plenty of Filipino-centric references, but hopefully the context should be obvious enough for international readers to understand.

For many twentysomethings, the idea of being a kid started with "Pepsi... 7-Up!" on the roadside, and ended with our first (measly) paycheck, via Game & Watches, inuman sessions, and cramming for mid-terms. For better or worse, things seem decidedly more complex for those born after the '86 EDSA uprising. Like so much else in life, the concept of youth has been redefined dramatically, in the last few decades or so. If you believe philosopher Francis Fukuyama, mankind has reached the so-called "end of history", with the spread of liberal democracy, and the rise of a global market economy. One side effect of these hyper-mobile capital flows has been the increasing focus on kids as consumers.

In various ways, "tweens", high schoolers, and college undergrads have each become discrete target markets for a surprising range of goods and services, from cellphone plans to racy underwear. There are now marketing gimmicks devised to separate teens from their spending money. But how do these media-savvy young adults buy into -- or resist -- the lure of the consumer world? That's what Alissa Quart hoped to answer when she penned Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers (2004).

More like pop journalism than scholarly work, Quart's book reads like a collection of well-researched, critical magazine articles. She avoids using too many dull statistics and complex, ivory-tower economic theories. Instead, she relies mostly on interviews and first-hand anecdotes to illustrate how the values of branding and corporate identity have made their way into various facets of adolescent life, from teen designer clothing lines, to movies that encourage reckless shopping as therapy.

Her work gives readers an insider's view of the youth culture industry. Quart interviews brand managers and their trend-setting "teen advisors". She meets with guiltlessly self-promotional young authors. She even reports on a marketing conference held just days after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US, when the somber mood threatened to dampen the 'celebration' of youth spending power. In the process, she exposes all the inner workings of youth branding, from promotional strategies to crass attitudes about kids' buying habits.



A lot of the examples cited are decidedly 'Western'; Quart is an Englishwoman, but her research was conducted mostly in America. Still, it's not difficult to make parallels with Filipino culture. The fuss over expensive Latina quinceanera celebrations is not so far removed from the hassles of organizing a sosyal debut party. And the stress of getting into a 'big name' university is certainly not limited to would-be applicants for Ivy League schools.

Quart is fiercely critical of corporate influence on youth culture, no doubt. But if you're hoping to read a Communist Manifesto for the Bratz set, think again. She clearly understands the appeal of cheap pop thrills for young people, steering clear of moralistic hand-wringing, as well as the dreary 'pop culture is bad' attitude of hardcore Marxian writers.

If Branded has one flaw, it's the lack of suggestions about ways to negotiate the encroachment of branding into everyday life. There are chapters titled "Unbranded" and "DIY Kids", featuring anarchist punk rockers and student radicals, who rage against the corporate machine in basement shows and campus auditoriums. But there are few other concrete proposals, if your tastes do not lean towards subculture and going organic. This is just a minor quibble, really; Quart has built a solid foundation on which other researchers can document more thorough alternatives to all this relentless consumption. (And when they do, I'll be ready to buy it.)

Tibby Rollins: Some Misplaced Joan of Arc

This is Part 2 of the Traveling Pants Critique Series, dealing with Ken Kwapis' movie adaptation of Anne Brasheares' novel. The first post is here.

Tabatha "Tibby" Rollins is played by Amber Tamblyn, whom some of you may recognize from her starring role in the short-lived girl-meets-God drama Joan of Arcadia, which transplanted the bare essentials of the Jeanne D'Arc mythos into contemporary suburbia. In Sisterhood..., Tamblyn is once again placed into the role of iconoclastic misfit.

When other characters describe Tibby, it usually involves platitudes to her rugged individualism. "She kind of marches to her own drum", says observant, artistic Lena, "She knows who she is." Aspiring writer Carmen is even more blunt, refering to her simply as "the rebel" of the group. In normative teen movie visual code, that means she gets the nose piercing and dyed blue highlights streaking her dark hair. To be fair, Tamblyn carries the look rather gamely, and she's very charming, in her snarky eye-rolling aloofness. Out of the four Sisters, Tibby is definitely the one who appeals to me most naturally, and Tamblyn's performance has a lot to do with this.

For the most part, Sisterhood... advances its narrative by placing each girl in a situation that marks her as Other in relation to her immediate surroundings. In Tibby's case, the plot finds her stuck at home in Maryland over the summer, packing goods onto the racks at the local branch of "Wallman's", a thoroughly generic hypermarket chain store *cough* Wal-Mart *cough* This setting conveniently marks her as a decisive outsider, with her solidly middle-class background, and aspirations of becoming a film-maker. In fact, her immediate goal is to save up extra cash for additional video equipment, hence the crappy summer job. For Tibby, it's all just a means to an end. And so she carries out her duties with a perennially surly disposition.

Tibby decides to take advantage of her situation, by using the citizens of her home-town as fodder for a "suckumentary" movie, depicting various "losers", and their "lives of quiet desperation" (her words, not mine). As one might guess, the plot demands that she outgrow her condescending attitude, and to recognize her neighbors and co-workers as Real People. The script achieves this by way of Bailey, a precocious but genuinely enthusiastic 12-year-old, who ends up becoming Tibby's assistant, through a series of contrived developments. While Tibby doggedly attempts to frame her subjects through her own preconcieved notions of "loser-dom", Bailey is able to recognize character nuances, effectively using openings in the conversation to get the interview subjects to become increasingly personal.

What stands out most about Tibby is her unique relationship with communications technology. She appears to use it as a method of gate-keeping, for various purposes:

i) She utilizes answering machines and cellphone screening functions to avoid taking personal calls, thus giving her the necessary time alone to concentrate on editing her film. (As a result, Carmen is forced to visit her house, in order to get her to console their upset pal, Bee.)

ii) She uses her recording equipment as a means to elevate ordinary sentiments into a form of documentary testimony. This is established very early in the movie, in a flashback that depicts a young Tibby lashing out to a camcorder about her parents' decision to have another baby, even after she herself has reached grade-school age. ("Was I just some experiment from their hippie days and now they're starting a real family?") The process of recording allows her mundane gripes and complaints to transcend into acts of witness (irrespective of their validity), a belief that motivates hundreds of personal video diarists from the so-called "YouTube Generation". Indeed, this practice has become so commonplace, it's satirized in comedy sketches like Hope Is Emo:



** MAJOR SPOILER! ** Highlight white space to read. Sisterhood... puts a more positive spin on this activity. After Bailey succumbs to leukemia, Tibby discovers a video greeting made by her young friend, pre-mortem, which serves as the final motivation towards her overcoming her judgmental ways.

iii) Perhaps most interestingly, Tibby relies on her camera -- and by extension, her status as budding documentarian -- as a tool for imposing her value judgements on others. She practices a very crude kind of Athusserian "hailing" or interpellation, by establishing the terms by which her subjects are represented. This is most evident when she approaches convenience store habitue Brian McBrian, an Asian-American kid with a reputation as the local "king of Dragon's Lair". With all the presumptuous authority of a colonial ethnographer, she proceeds to film him, evidently unsolicited, asking him loaded questions about why he prefers to spend his days in front of an arcade machine, instead of experiencing "real life". Actually, if Tamblyn didn't possess such disaffected know-it-all charm, I might have written off Tibby, on the spot.

For his part, McBrian responds to the questions in stride, whole-heartedly extholing the virtues of the game-world -- choosing the so-called Red Pill, as it were. His geeky enthusiasm seemingly wins over Tibby's interest (although she later expresses reget over the wasted footage). But it's just another example of the movie's conflicted depiction of technology.

In her own quirky way, Tamblyn-as-Tibby embodies the best and worst characteristics of American free enterprise, beyond the assembly-line restrictions of Fordist standardization: aggressively individualistic, open to the possibilities of new technologies, and entirely convinced of the truth of her world-view.


Next in the series: Carmen Lowell and the "Oprahfication" of American culture