How Young is Too Young?
The Quandary of Chasing Tween & Teen Consumers
This Friday, I had lunch with a girlfriend at a cute cafe with a big outdoor patio in Hayes Valley in San Francisco. We ordered at the counter, picked out the table, and waited for our food. In the ten minutes that it took the staff to whip up our watermelon gazpacho, falafel salads, and a way-too-big order of fancy mac and cheese for my son—we saw not one, not two, but six mice scurry across the patio.
In the restaurant’s defense, the building next door seemed to have just begun some serious construction, which was the likely culprit of so many mice on the prowl. However, we still rightly chose to move inside, scurrying with the same speed as the mice while balancing our plates and cups.
When we were leaving the restaurant, my four-year-old son ran to the bar and pulled himself up on a seat.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said. The bartender glanced over, and then down, at him.
“I have an idea. You should buy a mousetrap.”
Then he paused and added very seriously. “On Amazon.”
We all laughed. The advice was solid, and his delivery was on point. Then it got me thinking about how his four-year-old mind works, and how he is already extremely aware of both where and how to buy things that he thinks he needs.
Now, rewind to last Thanksgiving….
Posts, articles, and memes were just starting to circulate about Sephora Tweens—the twelve to sixteen-year-old girls taking over the aisles of the beauty retailer, buying hefty-priced brands like Drunk Elephant and Glow Recipe and advising their mothers on what to purchase for themselves.
I believe these girls are the unique product of a TikTok-run world, where the more adult beauty content is no longer gatekept in adult magazines but freely distributed to all via the algorithm. Hence, $2 Bonne Bell Lipsmackers have been replaced by $30 Laneige Lip Masks and teenagers suddenly have a level of understanding around skincare ingredients that could rival a dermatologist.
While waiting for the turkey to cook, I asked my cousin Madeline, a blond sixteen-year-old who lives in Sacramento, what she thought about the beauty and skincare world.
“I love it,” she said. “I spend all of my allowance on skincare, and I’m not even as into it as most of my friends. I just bought the COSRX Snail Mucin and it has literally changed my skin. And I use the best lash growth serum—I’ll send you a link.”
I nodded, “Sounds great.” Then she hit me with the real kicker…
“I’m NEVER going to have a wrinkle.”
When I heard those words come out of the mouth of this incredibly fresh-faced, naturally glowing young teen, my heart dropped for a minute. Why in the world was she thinking about wrinkles, I thought. Something just felt wrong here. And it still does.
This leads me to two big questions that I’m going to put some guardrails and advice around today.
When is it right to target younger consumers?
And when it does feel right, how should we best go about it?
Let’s start with the first question and address The Big When in the room.
What most bothers me about the Sephora tween phenomenon is that the types of products these kids are purchasing are products that have been made for and tested on adults. They contain ingredients like retinol that should not be touching the face of a teen and come in strengths that their skin does not need. Companies have formulated these products to address problems, but they’re adult problems, not kid problems.
So, I propose putting every product through my Teen-Market Fit Check.
You can use the Teen-Market Fit Check whether you’re:
Starting a new brand for tweens & teens
Creating a new line or product within an existing brand for tweens & teens
Deciding whether to start marketing your existing products to tweens & teens
The Teen-Market Fit Check consists of three simple questions:
What is the problem your brand or product is made to address?
Is this a problem that significantly impacts the bodies or minds of tweens & teens in some way?
When I made this product, did I design or formulate it specifically for tweens & teens? And did I test it to make sure it is good for them?
If the answer to all of these questions is yes, then you’re ready to move on to the next question—The Big How.
Your product will fix a real problem for tweens and teens. You’ve designed or formulated it with their needs top of mind. And you’ve tested it to show that it is safe for them.
Now you're ready to market it—but you want to market it in a way that you feel good about, not sleazy about.
Here are my top three tips:
1. Invite Them to Play
We’ve all been young adults ourselves—but the world is changing FAST, just like our customers. Our experiences aren’t necessarily the most relevant anymore… and young people’s radar for B.S. is at an all-time high, thanks to the amount of it they see on social media.
Hence, any brand or product being created with them in mind needs to take into account their input if it has a chance of truly succeeding.
Because of the age of the audience, this input isn’t as easy to get as that of adults, and you’ll likely need to pay more to run a focus group. But the reward of road-testing your concepts and getting audience participation in the process of creating and marketing to tweens and teens will far outweigh the cost in the end—as it will likely make the difference between your concept succeeding wildly or failing big time.
2. Give Them a Megaphone
That B.S. radar? It continues to be on high alert during every interaction tweens and teens have with your brand. That’s why it’s so important to anoint the right messengers.
More so than any other demographic, tweens and teens respond to messages from their peers. But not just any peers. The peers they consider “cool.” The one they look up to and want to be. Brands like the 2000s Abercrombie and today’s Brandy Melville understand this appeal—purposefully staffing their stores with the cool kids and hiring for a look and a vibe rather than skills that can be found on a resume.
And while Abercrombie and Brandy took this hiring practice to the extreme (and acted kind of nefarious about it), you should take the basic lesson to heart when you’re marketing to tweens and teens: let them authentically speak to each other about your brand, and they’ll be more convincing than any branded content could be.
3. Be Conscious of Your Stereotypes
When I was at Stanford, I wrote my master’s thesis on the negative mental effects of gender stereotypes in advertising. I demonstrated how advertising is inherently the means of communication that’s the most reliant on stereotypes because the extremely short storytelling format leaves little time for character development.
I also showed how advertising is the most mentally impactful means of communication, because of its pervasiveness and the amount of unconscious exposure people have to it.
That’s why I believe that brands need to be incredibly responsible for the stereotypes they portray—especially when they’re marketing to a young audience. In every piece of content you’re creating for a tween or teen audience, always ask yourself if you’re relying on any outdated or negative stereotypes to tell your story.
If the brands making products for tweens and teens use their impact for good, they have the power to create healthy models for a better world tomorrow. Kids are the future, after all.
Those are my thoughts for today on the conundrum of creating more products for and marketing to increasingly younger audiences. I’d love to hear yours.
The next time my son asks me to buy something on Amazon—whether it's a mousetrap or mouthwash—I hope it's a product that genuinely solves a problem for him, designed specifically for his age group, tested for his needs, created with his input, endorsed by his peers, and free from stereotypical marketing.
But if it's just another monster truck, that's okay too.
Thank you for your input! I wish teens and young adults understood the blessing of being old enough to even have wrinkles. It's only when you begin to understand that there are those unfortunate enough *not* to grow old enough to get their first wrinkles that wrinkles seem like the biggest gift the universe has to offer. The input was great and should be considered for all growing businesses these days, since teens have a way of sliding into the adult world, whatever it may be. Thank you for sharing :)