Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers

by Alissa Quart (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2004

  $27.80

  Generation Y has grown up in an age of the brand, bombarded by name products. In Branded, Alissa Quart illuminates the unsettling new reality of marketing to teenagers, as well as the quieter but no less worrisome forms of teen branding: the teen consultants who work for corporations in exchange for product; the girls obsessed with cosmetic surgery who will do anything to look like women on TV; and those teens simply obsessed with admission into a name-brand college. We also meet the pockets of kids attempting to turn the tables on the cocksure corporations that so cynically strive to manipulate them. Chilling, thought-provoking, even darkly amusing, Branded brings one of the most disturbing and least talked about results of contemporary business and culture to the fore-and ensures that we will never look at today's youth the same way again.

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $3.25

  Corporations spend billions of dollars annually to woo teen and pre-teen consumers. Over the last 5-10 years, the research of these groups and their behaviour has become very focused on exactly how best to part them (or their parents) with their money. Alissa Quart takes the reader into the disturbing world of teen marketing, showing how they are taught to market to each other and where adults build careers out of insinuating their way into 'friendships' with teens in order to monitor what they wear, eat, listen to and talk about with each other. This compelling book looks into the way teens succumb to peer pressure and the constant commercial battering and the young people who fight back, who turn the tables on the cock-sure mega-corporations who so cynically strive to crack the codes of teen cool. These kids prove it isn't necessary to give in to branding, but it is a drop in the water when an entire generation is being raised to consume.