Branding Todays Youth

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Branding Todays Youth

• Dr. Fiona Beals
• Victoria University of Wellington

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Amongst young people nowadays there is immense
pressure to buy, to drink the right drinks, wear
the right clothes and listen to the right music.
We seem to have products blasted at us from all
directions with varied and outrageous advertising
campaigns, slogans and gimmicks. Every company
strives for their product to be the coolest, the
freshest and the most available. This constant
bombardment can prove to be incredibly
overwhelming and confusing when taken as a whole.
(Addison, cited in Lawrence, 1999, p. 12)
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Arnett and the AMP Model
IDENTITY
Motivation
R/A/I
SELECTION
LIVED EXPERIENCE
APPLICATION
Attention
Evaluate Interpret
INTERACTION
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It's Friday night. Getting ready to go out. The
guys have their beers, the chicks - their RTDs.
They're wearing the right skate and street-label
clothes bought from the right shops - Hound Dog,
Lee or Extra Large, from Arizona or Wild Pair.
Retro works. As usual there's plenty of weed for
a session later, but they'll be looking for some
E if they decide to carry on. They've all got
mobile phones, so finding a source won't be hard.
The conversation swings back to what tattoos and
piercing to get next, before the law changes mean
they'll need to ask. When they're hungry they'll
head off for a feed at Burger King, or Wendy's,
depending on what part of town they end up in ...
This group, of course, doesn't exist. But if it
did, the members would be middle-class, average
New Zealanders, with a mean age of 17. (Lawrence,
1999, p. 11)
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Branding Todays Youth

• Tweenies
• Tomorrows consumer today
• Homogenization of a generation
• Alcopops and Teenage drinkers
• Tomorrows drinker today
• Separating generations
• Matching illegal industries
• Self-fulfilling prophecy

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What to do?

• Critical literacy
• Reading the world
• No Reading their world!
• Reading the agenda of marketed texts
• Who is saying this Truth?
• How is a product designed in such a way to
  attract me?
• How does it connect to my world?
• How does it not connect to my world?
• What people is this product not designed for?
  Why?
• Does it connect to the lives of all young people?

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References

• Adolescent Health Research Group. (2004). Alcohol
  and New Zealand youth A snapshot of young
  people's experiences with alcohol (Research
  Report). Auckland The University of Auckland.
  Retrieved from http//www.youth2000.ac.nz/pdf/dec
  04/Alcohol-Inside-text17.pdf
• Alcohol Advisory Council. (2002). Media workshop.
  Paper presented at the Partnerships Conference
• Arnett, J. J. (1995). Adolescents' uses of media
  for self-socialization. Journal of Youth and
  Adolescence, 24(5), 519-533.
• Arnett, J. J., Larson, R., Offer, D. (1995).
  Beyond effects Adolescents as active media
  users. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 24(5),
  511-518.
• Besley, A. C. T. (2002). Hybridised world-kids
  Youth cultures in the postmodern era. Paper
  presented at the European Conference on
  Educational Research. Retrieved 31 March, from
  http//www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00002362
  .htm
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  (Occasional Paper). St Ives, United Kingdom
  Institute of Alcohol Studies. Retrieved from
  http//www.ias.org.uk/resources/papers/occasional/
  brainpaper.pdf
• Braunias, S. (2000, September 2-8). Land of the
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• Coleman, L., Cater, S. (2003). What do we know
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• Davis, G., Dickinson, K. (Eds.). (2004). Teen
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• France, A. (2007). Understanding youth in late
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• Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical
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• Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M.
  B. Ramos, Trans.). New York Continuum.
• Global Education Centre. (2005). Eating the media
  lunch Understanding the impact of mainstream
  media on young people's development. Global Bits
  Change for a just world (4).
• Global Education Centre. (2006). Creating
  culture Young people and advertising. Global
  Bits Change for a just world (3).
• Goodman, S. (2003). Teaching youth media A
  critical guide to literacy, video production, and
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• Harris, A. (2004). Jamming girl culture Young
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• Houghton, E., Roche, A. (2001). Learning about
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• Howe, N., Strauss, W. (2000). Millennials
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  Vintage Books.

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