The Tween Market: Keeping Our Collections Attractive, Practical And Effective

By Rita Soltan, Library Youth Services Consultant and Staffperson, Educational Resources Laboratory at Oakland University, rss50@yahoo.com.

This article is based on a statewide workshop on Tween Services given in May 2003 by Rita Soltan with The Library of Michigan.

Fifteen to twenty years ago, there was a push to address the baby and toddler population in the marketing and publishing world, producing a growing number of programs and services encompassing board books, educational toys, parent/child story times and play group sessions. Similarly, today's tweens, children between the ages of 9 to 12, have been singled out by the advertising industry as a youth marketing bonanza. A revolutionized approach has resulted in an enormous influence on tween behavior and how parents and adults working with these kids have had to adapt. The service we provide to tweens today is directly affected by the niche advertising researchers and marketers have created and targeted at a specific age group conditioned to behave more like adolescents than the children their chronological age implies they are. And like it or not, libraries have been brought into this tween marketing frenzy and need to stay in touch with what has been termed as "the Great Tween Buying Machine" (Siegel, Coffey, Livingston, 2001).

How advertisers cornered the tween market

Researching the advertising world's approach to this market provides some interesting insight into how librarians can create and maintain good overall collections for this age group. In their book, The Great Tween Buying Machine: Marketing to Today's Tweens, advertising professionals David Siegel, Timothy Coffey, and Gregory Livingston have recognized this market is a $100 million dollar industry. Their own company, Wondergroup, in Cincinnati, Ohio is an agency specifically serving the youth market. Tweens, according to these advertisers, characteristically have a split personality toggling between kid behaviors and teenage attitudes (Siegel et al, 2001, p. 4). This is something we are probably all familiar with both as parents and observers of children in our society. What is different today is that children are living in a much more sophisticated environment, where they are much more well-informed through their parents, the media, and the internet. They have greater exposure to both topics and issues that would not have been considered appropriate material 10 to 15 years ago.

The average tween today has three key characteristics according to Siegel, Coffey, and Livingston: instant gratification, success as a given, and liberal social values (Siegel et al, 2001, p. 25). The availability of everything from information to well-stocked super stores allows parents the opportunity to give kids what they want and when they want it. These parents, for the most part, are successful and provide appropriate motivation, consequently encouraging the feeling of limitless possibilities. Kids today are also exposed to everything from the Columbine school shootings to President Clinton's moral failures, thus making nothing taboo or providing any kind of shelter encouraging them to maintain a childhood status or innocence throughout the elementary school years.

Consequently, expectations for today's 9 to 12-year old are different than those of the previous generation. The tween today is more logical in his or her thinking, and more motivated to think about what is right or wrong and what is in or out of style. They face an earlier onset of puberty, entering the teenage stage at a more advanced rate.

These advertisers also refer to the psychology of today's tweens by defining psychologist Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs. The two basic categories of personal and social needs contain the four concepts of belonging, power, freedom, and fun (Siegel et al, 2001, p. 45). Feeling accepted by a peer group is probably highest on a tween's behavioral needs priority list. Staying in tune through the media via chat rooms, television commercials, and the like are indicators of what is and will be in or out of style. Choosing movies they like, clothes they think are stylish, and make-up do's and don'ts allows kids to stay in control and make decisions. Breaking free from parental controls at an earlier age with tether-like pagers, cell phones, and latchkey situations gives kids from working-parent homes more distance-supervised freedom than before. Having fun that is not necessarily related to specific toy or play situations, but more reliant on attitudes and behaviors, represents the norm for today's tween.

How has this marketing strategy affected our youth today?

On the other side of the coin, not everyone thinks this marketing strategy to tweens has been such a great idea. Kay Hymowitz, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes extensively on this subject. She refers to the recent "tweening of America" as a phenomenon that will continue in a downward age trend (1998). In her book, Ready or Not, she talks about the anticulturalization of the child through the media's successful deconstruction of childhood. Without denying the existence of childhood openly, advertisers have subtly imposed the idea that children are "capable, rational, and autonomous beings endowed with all the qualities necessary for their adulthood....needing little shaping by adults. In essence they are already finished and childhood has lost its traditional purpose - a time to shape raw human material into a culturally competent adult" (Hymowitz, 1999, p. 75-101).

Parents, psychologists, educators, advertisers, and even lawmakers have all sanctioned this theory. There is no such thing as preadolescence anymore; kids are now considered teenagers at age 10. Parents and other adults are now acquiescing to empowering kids to feel they have achieved the four needs of belonging, freedom, power, and fun. With this empowerment, the media has emphasized kids' autonomy and addressed them as, "kids who should be targeted with products, styles, and pop culture that flatters them as hip and aware almost-teens rather that out-of-it little kids. Kids viewed as teens who are independent, sophisticated consumers with their own language, music, and fashion" (Hymowitz, 1998).

Psychologist David Elkind also refers to this new child development situation in his book, All Grown Up and No Place to Go: Teenagers in Crisis, as "vanishing markers", or the erosion of the five growth markers that signal the passing from adolescent immaturity to adolescent sophistication. He defines these markers as clothing, activity, information, image, and authority and stresses two significant reasons for their necessity in a child's growth. First, they help adults limit the demands for maturing too early. Second, they offer young people rules, limits, and prohibitions that they can internalize to help them make age-appropriate decisions and choices (Elkind, 1998, p. 111-134). A kind of parental impotence emerges when kids dress more like small adults, participate at a younger ages in high school age-type competitive/organized sports and programs, and are being exposed to readily available mass media with little monitoring from parents. They are buying into the new realism that insists on portraying kids as adults in sitcoms, movies, and ad campaigns. Elkind believes this impotence is caused by society's undermining of key authority figures like teachers and parents and what he refers to as the homogenization of society with respect to age and authority.

How are publishers reaching out to tweens?

A recent article in Publishers Weekly confirms that publishers have come on board with this new trend in child development and responded in recent years in a variety of ways to the tween book and reading market demands. Publishers view the tween as their "bread and butter" business and have stayed with their coined phrase of middle-grade reader. Book series like Lemony Snicket, Time Warp Trio, Mary-Kate & Ashley, and Harry Potter are the big draw. Even backlist classic authors such as E.L. Konigsburg and Phyllis Reynolds Naylor still do very well with this age group. Here are the reasons why:

Kids in the 8-14 age bracket have become independent readers;
They are at various levels of mastering and refining their reading skills;
They have developed various attitudes toward reading;
They undertake more intensely involved school work and assigned reading.

Most importantly, tweens are discovering their tastes as consumers and for the first time are spending their own money, an average of $9 per week (Maughan, 2002).

Publishers are aware that their new and back lists need to meet some diverse needs for this group. They are also aware of assignment and genre requirements as demanded by teachers and parents, so they make sure to include mystery, historical fiction, and biography. They are also keenly aware of summer reading programs, both through school initiatives and the public library, and maintain their back lists accordingly.

Publishers' surveys also indicate that despite competition with other activities and exposure to mass media, middle-grade readers still have time to "flex their leisure reading muscles" (Maughan, 2002). Publishers are continuing to take advantage of the Harry Potter factor by providing more fantasy and gothic themes, reaching both boys and girls with the series approach, and staying tuned to how the tween marketing factors stressed in the advertising world influence the tweens' concept of what is "with it and in". Timing is also crucial as they realize these trends appear and fade so rapidly. Publishers make use of a variety of marketing strategies to reach their middle-grade readers through the Internet such as author websites, chat rooms and message boards. Well-planned target marketing at shopping malls are then employed in conjunction with the movie and music industries. Book tie-in promotions at specialty stores such as Pleasant Co. with American Girl series, Warner Brothers with Harry Potter, and Disney are also strategically used. The use of magazine advertising and catalog soliciting is very effective, as tweens read magazines more than anything else.

How can the public library keep up?

The traditional library follows the basic principles of cataloging and the Dewey Decimal System to organize the collection. Making your collection as accessible and visible as possible should be your goal in serving your tweens. This is where we can take cues from the marketing and bookstore businesses that have succeeded in creating a niche and attracting a target audience.

Think outside the traditional mode to find creative ways to house, display, and employ your collection so it invites your tweens to areas they both looking for, needing to use, and perhaps can be subversively introduced to as well. Group curriculum support topics together, such as a unit for science projects and experiments. This particular area of the curriculum spans the 500-620 area in Dewey.

Your marketed areas can be permanent or rotating, depending on the categories you are creating. Highlight non-fiction and fiction interests such as sports (group biographies together with information books, and sports fiction), fashion, music, self-help, fantasy/horror, mild graphic novels, science fiction, mystery, series fiction, etc. Don't forget to market your targeted collections with plenty of signage! In addition, use the web as both a resource for tweens and a link to all your collection rationale through your library's homepage. Stay in step with the publishing and advertising world by reading about the latest trends and visiting several bookstores frequently to glean ideas.

Another idea is to recreate a merchandized display unit of only science experiment books, CD-ROMs, and videos in Dewey order, but keep separate from the traditional non-fiction collection, and watch how easily your tweens and parents will fulfill their assignment needs. Think of other curriculum support areas such as folk and fairytales suitable for forensic assignments and create merchandized units for those.

While some of these suggestions may not sound new, taking the first step to evaluate with a new critical eye how your existing youth collection is being used or ignored will inspire you to look at things more from a tween's perspective. While marketing strategies work for all segments of the population, ultimately the middle school youngsters, newly dubbed tweens, are the ones we are trying to reach and attract most in our library buildings today, amidst the numerous competing diversions and pastimes available in our ever-expanding modern environment. Let's welcome and encourage them to use their libraries with as much interest and excitement.

Bibliography

Acuff, D. S. (1997). What kids buy and why: The psychology of marketing to kids. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Bethune, B. (1999, November). High-flying tales for tweens. Maclean's, 112(47), 101-102.

Elkind, D. (1998). All grown up And no place to go: Teenagers in crisis. Reading, MA: Perseus Books.

Hofmann, M. (2002, November). Looking at language: One library media teacher's philosophy for book selection. School Library Journal, 48(11), 44-46. [Electronic version].

Hymowitz, K. S. (1998, Autumn). Tweens: Ten going on sixteen, City Journal, 8(4). [Electronic version]. Retrieved January 15, 2004 from http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_4_a1.html.

Hymowitz, K. S. (1999, October). Cheated Out of Childhood. Parents, 74(10), 175-179.

Hymowitz, K. S. (1999). Ready or not: Why treating children as small adults endangers their future - and ours. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Jones, P. (2003, March). To the teen core: A librarian advocates building collections that serve YA Readers. School Library Journal, 49(3), 48-51. [Electronic version].

Kantrowitz, B., & Wingert, P. (1999, October 18). The truth About tweens. Newsweek, 134(16), 62-72.

Maughan, S. (2002, November 11). Betwixt and be "tween". Publisher's Weekly, 249(45), 32-36..

Siegel, D. L., Coffey, T. J., & Livingston G. (2001). The great tween buying machine: Marketing to today's tweens. Ithaca, NY: Paramount Market Publishing, Inc.

you are: contents > Article 2 (top)