Merchants of being Cool

There are even more teenagers then their baby boomer parents. These teens control 150 billion dollars and many corporations are happy to give them a market in which they can buy their products. Corporations are "colonizing" teens and one even said that "teens are like Africa". We are the main business in which many corporations feed off of us. Some have even got into hiring people to find out what's cool but even find out what is going to be cool so they can rush it into the stores and create cool before it was even popular the only problem is that as soon as you discover something that is cool, its dead. Sprite even did this by trying to do anti-ads to appeal to teens who feel like corporations are just trying to sell them things. Sprite said "hip-hop became the vehicle for us" when talking about staying popular with teenagers. Many corporations are feeding on what we think is cool and are selling it back to us. By giving teens a say in what we think is cool and should be the new consumer product they are hooking us by giving us power. We have the illusion of control but we are really just being fooled by forgetting that our free choice was just the other one that was presented.

Teens witness 3,000 discrete advertisements a day. They also have a lot of money in their pockets and are more then willing to spend, which is every corporations dream. Many naive teenagers ready and waiting to find things that they can buy. Corporations knowing this find ways to appeal to this generation. One main way corporations get teenagers to buy products is that their advertisements circle around the most important thing in every teens life, cool. Every teen wants to be cool but of course its not cool to go and actively say yea i want to be cool, it has to be on the sly. Corporations give them this chance as they sell things that they think will become cool so that kids go out and start buying them making the product itself cool. Most of the money teens acquire is from guilt money, parents can't spend time with them so they give them money to go shop (fill the void with materialistic items).

So why should we care that the corporations are using us and that our overall sense of wanting to feel important is driving us to spend? Most teenagers don't care and the even greater majority are probably not even aware of anything that is going on in corporate spending and consumer goods. All they care about is making sure that there overall desire of wanting to be cool and feeling important is met. Often times its not and in accordance to this, many teenagers go out and buy products that they think will get them the attention in which they would not have otherwise. Corporations are feeding on this weakness and teens are more then willing to let them as long as they get something back in the process. Not saying it would not be hard to one less teen who is not influenced by advertisements they see in their everyday life. You can not avoid this part of our culture but knowing that it's there is a big step in which teens can focus on to stop their overall drive to be cool and spend money.