Articles from 2002
Scramble to cash in on Tweens
The Sydney Morning Herald | September 30, 2002
Sabrina The Teenage Witch is American and older, but she's not real. Britney Spears is American and real(-ish), but she's getting to be ancient history.
So what's a girl to do, when she's looking for role models? The answer might have to be Mary-Kate and Ashley, aka The Olsen Twins, whose line of products was launched in Sydney last week as the latest attempt to capture the elusive market known as The Tweens - girls aged 10 to 13.
The tweens are too old for Barbie, but too young for boys; not ready for real make-up, but on the verge of menstruation. And they possess enough numbers (450,000) and enough cash (average pocket money $7.50 a week) to be a prime target of the advertising industry - if it could only figure out what they want.
"Tweens have a lot of spending power and there is no-one here really filling that market," says Doug Chapman, chairman of the consultancy Marketing Store.
"They can be reached, they do behave as a cohesive group, but you rarely see anything that deals with the intellect and interests of girls of that age," he says. "They are more discerning than boys, who tend to follow fads." Mr Chapman suspects the Olsen twins, stars since infancy in such series as Full House, Two of a Kind and So Little Time, will hit the spot with Australian tweens. That's partly because at 16, they are the right age to be role models for 11-year-olds ("kids are getting older younger"), partly because they are American ("I haven't seen an example where American marketing fails on Australian children") and partly because $600,000 will be spent on advertising during October for the clothes, shoes, dolls, make-up, sunglasses and backpacks that will join the videos, books and games already bearing their names.
Mr Chapman says the promoters of the Olsen twins have correctly assessed that tweens have high brand awareness and want to look older than they are, buying "things that appear to be make-up", such as lip gloss and glitter eyeshadow. Until now, products linked with Sabrina the Teenage Witch have come closest to meeting this need. Last year's local attempt at a tween idol was the singer Nikki Webster, who sold a lot of records but did less well with cosmetics.
Matt Balogh, managing director of Ingenuity Research, thinks Webster's problem was that she seemed too young. "She may have been 15, but she looked about 12, and these girls rarely have peers as heroes," he said.
Ingenuity Research has studied tweens in a project involving 450 children who (with parents' permission) filled in questionnaires earlier this year on their interests and habits.
The project found that compared with boys, girls aged 10 to 13 were more likely to do homework (40 minutes a day), socialise with other girls (three hours a day), watch TV (two hours and 20 minutes a day), spend money on clothing, and say they "care a lot" about their friends and their schooling. By year's end, we'll know if they can also be persuaded to care a lot about Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
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