Advertisers target kids in back-to-school marketing

You can hear it coming. Aisles rumble with carts of merchandise. A usually ignored corner of the store becomes a hub of frustrated parents, oversize shopping carts, and children defending the purchase of as many gel pens as possible. A notebook will be cause enough for a disheveled mother to squeeze through the crowd and attack merchandise. And over the hum of parents' sighs and the mass of children clutching the folders they must have, the cash register will start to beep.
Back-to-school shopping is on its way. Retailers everywhere have probably been counting down the days until its arrival ever since kids finished counting down the days until summer. Advertisers have been putting new spins on the overdone concept of back-to-school shopping as well, framing their ad campaigns in slogans like "Back to cool!"
Everyone knows that pencils and paper have everything to do with cool -- according to the media and marketing, that is. And kids are buying it (pun intended). They are buying the messages and thus buying the merchandise.
According to a 2002 National Retail Federation (NRF) Survey, "Kids [are] flexing their spending muscles more than ever" and are actually pushing their parents out of the way in checkout lines. NRF concluded that "nearly half [49.1 percent] of households with 'tweens and teens -- ages 13 to 17 years old -- say their kids will use their own money on back-to-school purchases," spending an average of $147.
Teenage buying power
This highlights teenagers' vulnerable roles as consumers. Forget talking to parents anymore. Kids have the buying power, and if they can't persuade their parents to buy something, then they'll just go out and get it themselves. Advertisers are paying attention, which explains why back-to-school campaigns capture kids' attention instead of their parents'. Honestly, would a parent be interested in "back to cool"? Slogans like that have "kid" written all over them.
In general, the back-to-school shopping spree is disheartening. August makes average people look like ants crawling all over one another for school supplies. More and more, however, teens are in the middle of the chaos, with their money in one hand and advertisers' "advice" in the other. I can only imagine that the same brilliant advertisers who commercialized the holiday season are responsible for this, too.
Yet a high school student can tell you that a cheap pen writes a sentence just like an expensive pen, or that a plain notebook will accept notes as well as a heavy duty Five Star notebook. In spite of our ability to see this for ourselves, we still fill our heads -- and our carts -- with the notion that dropping the big bucks to hit the books makes sense. We can earn a high school diploma, but it seems we just can't do the math and outsmart the advertisers. We keep coming back to buy "bigger and better" while paying more.
Inevitable market
Kids will inevitably go back to school this year, and advertisers will find ridiculous slogans to pin on the mad dash to retail centers. What isn't inevitable is our response. We live in a consumer society, but that doesn't mean we can't be smart consumers. Shop sensibly, and remember: Those plain notebooks really do work as well as five-subject super notebooks with perfectly perforated sheets. I promise.
XEmily A. Stoddard, 19, of Grand Rapids, Mich., is a columnist for Blue Jean Online. Read more articles and reviews by young women at http://www.bluejeanonline.com, or check out the book "Blue Jean: What Young Women are Thinking, Saying and Doing. & quot;