Too often, the interests of teenage girls – no matter what they may be – are dismissed as superficial, trivial, or unworthy of serious attention. The irony of this backlash is how often teenage girls drive popular culture and with it consumer sales.
Early adopters and trendsetters
When the Beatles first arrived in the United States, most American adults simply didn’t “get it” and referred to the band’s music as “nothing more than noise.” Nonetheless, the Beatles’ early success is largely due to teenage girls buying their records and merchandise en masse. Teenage girls are also credited for the early success of Elvis and Frank Sinatra. Today they are seen as the fanbase of many of the biggest artists in the last two decades including Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, One Direction, and Taylor Swift.
Eva Rose, a singer-songwriter, explained, “I don’t understand why anyone would ever look at the fanbase of, you know, a band or an artist like One Direction and see that they are predominantly female and say they suck. Like, look at their bank accounts.”
It isn’t music that gets downplayed for appealing to teenage girls. When the Barbie movie was released in 2023 – a movie made by and for women – film critics claimed the movie was unserious, lacked depth, and was overall just a bad movie. Despite the criticism, Barbie was the highest-grossing film of 2023 and the highest-grossing movie in Warner Bros. history.
Driving consumer sales
So why should businesses care about teenage girls? As a reporter for Business Insider explained, “Once you hook a teen, particularly fashion mavens like teen girls, you hook them as they grow into independent adults with even greater spending power. They’re an incredibly lucrative demographic, and their preferences matter.”
In 2009 an article in Harvard Business Review began by stating, “Women now drive the world economy.” The survey found that women control the vast majority of consumer spending in the United States, including purchases for home furnishings (94%), vacations (92%), and new homes (91%). A more recent study has found that women also purchase more than half of products that are traditionally advertised to men, including automobiles, home improvement products, and consumer electronics.
Considering that women are projected to control 75% of discretionary spending by 2028, it may be a wise business decision to shift marketing efforts to this demographic. And one of the best places to find out what this market wants is by listening to what they’re already saying on social media.
Teen girls and social media
Research has shown that social media use can be damaging to the mental health of teenage girls, but the conversation on whether teenage girls should be using social media is much more nuanced than saying these platforms are inherently bad for them. Social media has allowed teenage girls the ability to talk back to critics, build a platform, and have their voices heard by the mainstream in a way that wasn’t possible before. The problem isn’t necessarily the platform, but rather the advertisements on it.
While teenage girls used to look toward TV shows and magazines for recommendations, they now open their phones to find out what’s the latest and greatest from, what appears to be, their peers. This has allowed an entire generation of teenage influencers to emerge and businesses have flocked to these creators and platforms to sell their products. A Harvard study estimating “Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube collectively derived nearly $11 billion in advertising revenue from U.S.-based users younger than 18 in 2022.”
Teenage girls are a valuable demographic with insights that can make businesses better. Rather than criticizing girls for their interests, businesses would benefit from listening to what they have to say.
