If you have sons and daughters between the ages of 8 and 14, you might still think of them as children. But for more and more businesses, they are neither children nor traditional teenagers; they’re tweeners. And tweeners are becoming one of the hottest consumer demographic clusters — and a big opportunity for revenue growth.
As CBS News reported at the end of last year, even though tweeners can’t drive or vote, they are “the most powerful consumer group since the baby boomers.”
These young consumers consider themselves too old and mature for childish things. The Toy Manufacturers of America Factbook admits that the target market for toys has shrunk: Previously, the toy industry’s end-users were children from birth to 14, but now the upper age limit is 10.
TD Monthly, a trade magazine for the toy industry, reports that the 20 million tweeners in the U.S. abandon toys for products that appeal to their older, teenaged siblings. Tweener boys buy electronic, video, and Internet games. Girls prefer products that focus on fashion and social interaction.
This trend has been building momentum since 1998. In that year, Bruce Friend, the vice president of worldwide planning and research for the Nickelodeon cable television network, said, “The 12- to 14-year-olds of yesterday are the 10 to 12s of today.” In other words, children are outgrowing children’s programming at an earlier age than ever before.
As they move more rapidly out of childhood, they also acquire a teenager’s taste for spending that much sooner. According to 360 Youth, the marketing research arm of Alloy, Inc., America’s tweeners independently spend $51 billion. They get this money from a variety of sources, like gifts and allowances. Similarly, they hold considerable sway over the additional $170 billion spent directly on them each year.
More importantly, they also influence major family purchase decisions — everything from cars to computers to grocery brands to vacation destinations. While separate figures for tweeners are hard to come by,Time magazine recently reported that children under 13 influence $600 billion in their parents’ spending.
They’re also the next wave of teenagers — a wave that will be larger than the...
