Second, they are undoubtedly the wealthiest generation of teenagers. Third, they probably have more discretion over their purchasing decisions than ever before. Fourth, teenagers are subject to the influence of marketers because they have few loyalties to brands or companies built up over years, and because they have few real needs. They are able to buy what they want not what they must. Finally, despite a lifetime of bombardment, teens are still less inured, and more plugged into marketing messages through the media than any other demographic.
Teens certainly appear to be a difficult demographic group to get hold of.
Teens will leap from product to product, fashion to fashion, musical style to musical style like madly pollinating bees. What they respond to most reliably is this maddeningly elusive thing called cool. Most frustrating is that cool is most often defined in opposition to mainstream marketing. So, like opposite polarized magnets, the closer corporate America comes, the faster cool kids flee in the other direction, dragging the rest of youth culture along. The challenge for teen marketers becomes how to market to teens without seeming to do so.