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Does Marketing Try to Extend Adolescence,

the Culture of High School, and Clique-thinking?

When adolescents feel the need to form identity they first join groups. This is a stage before full individuation. Modern marketing and consumerism intervenes in this process and tries to fix this teenage stage of identity formation to help sell products, to make it a permanent phase.

The stage of joining groups is both individualistic and group at the same time. What we have is a young person trying to develop a unique identity by experimenting with basic tools and practices -- these include dress, language, role models, common activities, musical tastes, symbols and etc. These are basic elements in the formation of personality.

This form of individuality is a half step, it is individuality in a group mode. It arises from a need for an adolescent to distinguish herself or himself from other youth. The result is of course a paradox or a transitional duality.

This behavior lasts for some a few years and for others many years into their 20s or even into the 30s. But normally at a certain point, these young people drop these groups and then grasp that true individuality is separate from groups. They by degrees leave these communities of joint identity and culture, they strike out alone. At least they should. Drivers of this new behavior are living alone and independence.

However, modern consumerism is more comfortable with the prior behavior of group identities; the reason is simply that products cannot be made unique for each individual. They are sold to large demographic sectors. Thus, marketing tries to create groups and trends and spokespeople. So, while young people are trying to break out of this mindset, consumerism tries to pull them back, or perhaps, offering a new group to join.

To create cliques or sects of product users is a practical marketing and advertising strategy. If people were to buy on a non-clique basis, how would you create a marketing image? How can you use role models and celebrities if everyone is different? What emotional fear or inadequacy can you play upon?

Marketing mythology now collapses. And marketing mythology is of course not a real mythology at all; it is the consumerist version of it, stunted, warped and manipulative.

When people become individuals, strategies do not work well anymore. People can still be swayed but the task is much more difficult, and what the company now has to contend with is practicality, budget and function, because the myth of group think no longer masks those issues. When you are an individual group think does not appeal to you, it looks silly and degrading, and now you buy more on the basis of need and not fears of this or that.

Consumerism tries to keep the young person in a state, if possible, of permanent adolescence, that is, in a state of group differentiation and group identity or clique-think. If it can be done, the goal is to retain a client beyond his or her thirties into the forties and beyond, to keep the individual in a permanent state of “high school”.

So one reason why so much stress is put on youth in advertising is to not just promote the new, the vital, youthful beauty and so on, but to create a fixed state of clique-thinking. It is so much easier to sell to those in this mindset. It is interesting that the greatest spending is actually done by middle aged consumers while most the marketing is youth oriented. Is this an error or not on the part of corporations?

There is an interesting related idea here: The success of this marketing strategy may be related to the rise of sectarianism in US culture, that is, the rise in political and cultural warfare between very hostile, mutually exclusive groups. This may well be an extension of adolescent behavior in a certain way. Sectarianism appears in junior high and high school where the various cultural groups have nothing to do with each other. So it is possible America has become “one big high school”, and that we are applying our marketing and shopping training to all issues and values in society. This is something to consider.

In any case, it is very interesting that the stages of identity formation of an individual and the strategy of marketing and advertising are so closely related. This is not a coincidence. Perhaps it is not consciously done, that repeated experience tells the marketer to try what works. The result is the same, though no scientific researcher has necessarily told them in direct terms that the strategy is to hold back maturation and extend the teenage years in order to subvert the identity process -- but the actions are the same.

Identity formation for the young is a long and difficult process. Ancient societies gave assistance to adolescents in this painful period. In modern culture we do nothing to help. Children are left open to manipulation by marketing techniques. This does not help them and adds to their stress.

Cage Innoye

Axxiad News