Betwixt and be Tween: age ambiguity and the sexualization of the female consuming', Journal of Consumer Culture 4(2): 203-207, Cook, D. T. et Kaiser S. (2004)

Résumé du document

The article entitled 'Betwixt and Be Tween' looks at the subject of Tween girls as a dream of marketers. Cook depicts the Tween girls as a commercially constructed market persona. A lot of questions are raised by the premise evoked above. Who are the Tweens? How children construct their identity? What is the identity of a Tween girl? What is the role of the market in the construction of the Tween identity? Are children growing up too earlier and too fast nowadays? The term Tween appeared for the first time in 1987 to depict a market involving children aged from 9 to 15. The Tween is an age-based category used to describe the transition between the childhood and the teenage status, in other words, it engages kids that reject childlike images and aspire to be more mature. According to Cook and Kaiser, the main preoccupations of Tweens are- growing up faster and being popular. Moreover, marketers figured out that there is a lot of money to be made by treating them this way. Indeed, Tweens is an extremely influent and powerful market segment. According to a study, the Tween market may represent more than $1 trillion per year.

Extraits

[...] Indeed, scared by the end of the Tween luxurious market, professionals act for a more sexualised tendency (Cook and Kaiser, 2004). However, little girls are seen to be more impressionable targets of marketing and advertising. In the transitional process from childhood to teenage status, girls are particularly vulnerable to commercial appropriation (Russell and Tyler, 2005). Therefore, they should have followed this change of directions toward sophisticated feminity. The paper of Russell and Tyler (2002) describes the ultimate experience of girlhood. [...]

[...] However, the Tween girl is vulnerable to commercial appropriation and its identity depends on how the marketers depict feminity. Experiencing the building process to womanhood, little girls met the perfect body image of Barbie and commercials involving young models and sexual hints. Therefore, the image of the Tween girl is not re-moralised by the specific market segment. Even if today some practices are highly criticised by magazines or organizations, the little girls are still influenced by the way their icons look like. [...]

[...] London. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers Publications: Advertising Standards Authority (2003) British code of advertising, sales promotion and direct marketing', 11th edition McDougall, J. and Chantrey, D. [...]

[...] Products advertisements often contain sexual hints and because of these images, many girls want to grow up sooner than they should. Moreover, the ‘Barbie factor' has been accused for years to be responsible of providing a stereotype image of the perfect women linked to physical beauty and sex appeal. It impacts the construction of little girls' identities (Cook and Kaiser, 2004). Showered with sophisticated sexualized looks, the Tween girl is developing a conforming feminine appearance to this aesthetic ideal of feminity (Russell and Tyler, 2002). How these images reached the little girls? Marketers treat Tween as independent and mature consumers. [...]

[...] The term Tween appears for the first time in 1987 to depict a market involving children aged from 9 to 15 (Hall, 1987). The Tween is an age- based category used to describe the transition between the childhood and the teenage status, in other words it engages kids that reject childlike images and aspire to be more mature. According to Cook and Kaiser (2004), the main preoccupations of Tweens are: growing up faster and being popular. Moreover, marketers figured out that there is a lot of money to be made by treating them this way. [...]