06/11/2024 03:56:00 PM 
What can we learn about tweens from the knowledge that these are the products that have successfully evolved to meet their needs and desires?
For one thing, there is no evidence of the anti-marketing 'radar,' characteristic of older teenagers. From scoobie-doo pop-tarts to cookie-cutter boy-bands, the successful products are blatantly branded with gimmicks galore. It's the only demographic where the consumer will develop fierce brand loyalty from watching a hard-sell ad during Saturday morning television; they know it's an ad trying to get them to buy something, they know scoobie-doo has very little to do with the actual food product, but they don't care.
Around 9 years old, kids have their first experience of immersion into youth culture. Over the next mountain they can sense the presence of a vast revolution, a future in which peers will matter more than family, but it hasn't arrived yet. This age marks the beginning of the charade of trying to seem older and further along in their development than they actually are. They have an unevolved hunger for some kind of packaged identity that fits their vague sense of 'cool.' This is the vulnerability that leads to a kind of mass-adoption, such that many tween markets are essentially winner take all. Boy bands are the ultimate example as millions of tween girls (and only tween girls) completely and wholeheartedly choose one of these glitzy branded creations. Unlike with 14 year olds, there is zero interest among tweens to avoid being part of mass movements. This underlies the timelessness of tween television programming and consumer goods. Tweens lack the self-consciousness about being seen as unoriginal that so characterizes the rapid life cycles of teenage trends.
It's an age where parents are often happy to give in to demands because they sense that the demands are relatively harmless: brightly colored snackfoods, Kate Spade purses, checkstand magazines. The parents sense the impending revolution and are happy to give in on these small, relatively meaningless token battles.
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