Like the music they listen to, THE magazines they read and the shows they watch, the task of selling to teens can be a shock tomany marketers' system. But delve into the youth culture, and you'll discover consumers who are ready to listen and eager to discover new brands. 

You know the rhetoric: teenagers are fickle and therefore marketing to them cannot possibly be an exact science. True enough, but it’s a science nonetheless.
Teens do change at lightning speed. Their mood, interests, concerns, tastes, aspirations and loyalties are constantly evolving. It’s the very nature of the stage they’ve reached in their lives.
Teens, by definition, are supposed to be in exploration mode, taking what their parents, teachers, friends and society at large have taught them and testing it against the realities they encounter daily—some might even say minute by minute.
Because they are still figuring out who they are and where they belong, teens live and shop by trial and error. A brand that speaks to them so loudly one day may be muted the next. And another brand that they might have always ignored suddenly moves them to the core. There’s no real patterns to it because the teen demographic is by no means homogenous.
To make matters worse, teenage years no longer solely define the period between the ages of 13 and 19. Now, more than ever, the teenage stage represents a mindset and a lifestyle that some consumers might adhere to well into their 20’s, if not longer—the desire to buck the system, seemingly ignore dress codes imposed by others, play more and work less.
This all makes for an overwhelming experience in any marketing department, be it that of a retail chain or in a shopping centre management office. However, where some marketers see complicated equations with no apparent solutions, others find the very clues that will help them devise effective marketing strategies that will resonate with their target audience.
Take fashion, for one. It’s a tough thing to sell to teenagers, especially when you’re a centre with a variety of retail stores that offer styles ranging from preppy to edgy. While overall branding gives teens a sense of your centre’s positioning, you need a customised dialogue to make a meaningful connection with prospective teenage customers.
It’s the approach Park Royal took when it designed a campaign to reach teens during this year’s back-to-school season.
The West Vancouver, Canada, shopping centre wanted to raise awareness of its fashion selection and thought it would be difficult to do effectively with the traditional newsprint media it was used to employing. Instead, Park Royal’s marketing department opted for a programme that would use spokespeople that teens could relate to and trust as fashion experts.
Personified by Brent O’Connor and Kelsey Imler, two energetic spokespeople with fashion and acting backgrounds, Park Royal’s Fashionologists were presented as "expert advisors in the study of current or prevailing styles and trends for the covering of the human body."
From 15th August to 6th September, the Fashionologists scouted teens, hitting the streets, beaches, local clubs and high-profile events. Armed with prescription pads on which they would write their style suggestions, the two highlighted the stores at Park Royal in which the fashions could be found.
The Fashionologists also handed out freebies, such as sunscreen, lip balm and Park Royal giftcards (approx. value of €7.50 or £5 each). At times, the centre even propped up eye-catching mannequins by the beach to help feature the looks of the season.
"Media training and a thorough education of Park Royal’s fashion offerings was given to the Fashionologists so that they would be confident giving interviews while being extremely knowledgeable about the product selection," explained Cindy Papa, Park Royal’s marketing director.
"Training [also] included how to tactfully suggest fashion improvements without insulting the person’s ego or sense of style, while always relating the fashion back to Park Royal."
Attention to soft skills certainly is critical when marketing to teens because you’re dealing with people who oscillate between brazen confidence and self-doubt that can easily lead to deep insecurities and defensiveness. The goal is to offer them the information they crave without shoving it down their throat like it’s the only palatable style fare on the market.
The Fashionologists played their sensitivity cards well, writing out more than 1,200 style prescriptions during the programme’s duration. Unbeknownst to them, one of these prescriptions would bring Park Royal some welcome media attention.
"One of the teenagers the Fashionologists met near the beach at English Bay was so excited about the programme that she went home and told her mum about it," Papa recalls. "It turned out that her mum was a producer for CTV, so we got great television coverage. It was proof that something was working."
Park Royal received over €15,000 (or £10,000) worth of media coverage on television, the radio and in print for its Fashionologist campaign. That complemented the promotional push that Park Royal itself initiated with a high-frequency radio campaign launched just prior to the Fashionologists hitting the streets—the spots explained what Fashionologists were and where they could be spotted. The locations were also posted online at ShopParkRoyal.com.
The centre’s campaign made more than 1.4 million impressions over six weeks, at a cost of just half a cent per impression.
Even with Park Royal’s success, Papa said some teens were tough to schmooze, stating that they would be more open to receiving style advice if it came from someone they knew.
This kind of familiarity is what fashion retailer Bootlegger tried to impart with Generation B, a grassroots and streetwise campaign that used advertising, public relations and promotions to generate excitement around the Bootlegger brand.
"We wanted to take inspiration from the streets of Canadian cities and run a campaign that involved the real people that make up the communities in which Bootlegger resides," said Dustin May, director of marketing. "If people see a model in an ad, they probably won’t connect with it. But if they see a leader, a friend or this successful person everyone’s heard about from their community smiling back at them, they’re going to take notice."
Bootlegger selected 54 young role models from 83 communities and flew them to Vancouver this past July for a photo shoot—the campaign was featured in stores and on the company’s Website (www.Bootlegger.com).
The residents of each community were then invited to vote for their representative and, for each cast ballot, voters received just under €7 (or £4.70) off any purchase of over €27 (or £18) at Bootleggers. The candidate who got the most votes would win €6,900 (or £4600) to invest in his or her life’s passion.
Bootlegger worked diligently to boost participation and increase the exposure of its brand, encouraging candidates to spread the word about Generation B in their community newspapers, as well as at their local schools, work and hangouts. Bootlegger even provided candidates with coupons to pass on to friends and it created a mini-Website where contestants could log on, get campaigning tips, email their friends and family, and download personalised MySpace templates and promotional posters. The site also featured real-time voting results that each candidate could peruse.
The West Coast’s Shane Wiebe ended up with the highest number of votes and he shared his excitement with Bootlegger and its clientele on the retailer’s Website.
The budding recording artist intends to use his prize money to get back into the studio. He also plans to donate €345 (or £230) to The Cyrus Centre, a local youth outreach centre.
Bootlegger’s scheme was really about role modelling and letting its brand speak to teens through their peers and in their own words. And the visual impact of featuring youths in the campaign was a powerful one.
Another well-known master of non-verbal communication is Abercrombie & Fitch, a fashion retailer that has managed to turn the common store giftcard into a communication vehicle that speaks volumes about youth style and lifestyles.
With almost grainy black-and-white photography as its creative, each card’s front face looks like a snapshot from a teenager’s life. Whether it is two friends posing for a closeup or the lens peeking at a young woman kissing her beau, the images don’t appear contrived but like they were taken right off the page of a teen’s photo album or personal journal.
The UK’s Dolphin Shopping Centre connected with youth as well earlier this year when it featured Leanne Medhurst, a young cancer survivor, as the star model of its Tenovus Fashion Show. Held on the 15th and 16th September, the event was the centre’s first-ever catwalk show and it strived to be an inspiring celebration of health and hope, as well as a fundraiser for the Tenovus cancer charity—four other cancer survivors volunteered as models. The show also highlighted Dolphin Shopping Centre’s fashion offering and gave customers a chance to win a variety of prizes throughout the weekend.
The event was multi-layered, mixing community outreach with entertainment and commercial pursuits—just the type of combination that multi-tasking teens seek out and enjoy.
Making such personal connections, telling the story behind a brand and providing a place—even a virtual one—where teens can congregate, find detailed information and engage in multiple activities at a time are highly effective strategies, according to teen expert Michael Wood.
He is the vice-president and director of syndicated research for Teenage Research Unlimited (TRU), a full-service teen marketing research firm based in Northbrook, USA, where he is responsible for the twice-annual TRU Study, a key tracking and segmentation study on which more than 150 of the world’s leading youth-oriented brands rely, including the likes of Coca-Cola, Gap, Microsoft, MTV and Nokia.
Wood told attendees at ICSC’s recent marketing and management conference that today’s teenagers are not only passionate consumers, but they are also mature consumers who are much more shopping savvy than previous generations of youths.
"These are ‘Maturiteens’, kids who are 15 going on 25," Wood explained. "They have a constant exposure to graphic images, sex, violence and drugs. Despite all that, today’s kids are good kids."
These teens are also what Wood calls ‘Backstorians’, consumers who like information and will seek out a very high level of detail on whatever interests them—how a photo shoot was done, how a product is made, what work a brand accomplishes away from the shop floor and in the community.
The advantage of this thirst for knowledge is that it gives retail and shopping centre marketers an opportunity to pitch their brands again and again. As long as these marketers have something new to offer and say, teens will be listening.
"This is the Re-Generation. Teens are willing to accept mistakes and start anew," Wood said. This applies not only to celebrities making mistakes but also to brands. TRU’s own research showed that only 10 percent of teenage respondents wouldn’t give a brand a second chance if it got things wrong the first time.
"The only real mistake you can make with teens is to never take a chance," he noted.
The reality is that whichever strategy you employ to market to teens today may no longer be effective six months from now, let alone in a year. As rhetoricians say, teenagers are fickle—your marketing should be too.