Many marketers perceive the youth market as a homogenous mass defined by one thing: age. It's Irma Zandl's job to change that perception. Zandl is president of Xtreme, Inc., a New York-based marketing consulting firm she started four years ago after stints in marketing at cosmetics firms such as Revlon and L'Oreal.

Zandl says that one of her goals is to get her clients (which include manufacturers of soft drinks, snack foods, jeans, and personal care products) to think of young consumers as an ethnic market that has its own set of customs and uses a complex language of slang, gestures, and symbols (found on clothing, jewelry, etc.) to communicate.

"Where a lot of people run into trouble with the youth market is they end up parodying it or they end up ridiculing it, basically because they just don't understand it and it seems like that's the thing to do. Whereas you know that if they were dealing with another culture or an international market, they would approach it with a totally different mindset."

Often she finds that marketers believe the only way to reach kids is to make their messages "fun."

"So many people do a disservice to the youth market when they think it only responds to 'fun.' That's really only one small segment of it. When you talk to young people, you can talk about the fun things and they'll be high-fiving each other and then the conversation can very quickly turn to serious issues in their lives.

"So it's not surprising that they also respond to things that have real emotion to them. I think that's very important because you can make things much broader and more meaningful in terms of reaching young people. It doesn't have to be one long MTV-style thing, which is how everything seems to be targeted to the young consumer."

National panel

Zandl collects information on the youth market through the Xtreme Consumer Panel, a national panel of over 1,000 12-24 year-olds that provides material for a newsletter and serves as a pool for participants in the many focus groups she conducts around the country. Those efforts are supplemented with a great deal of observational research and hours of conversation with kids - all of which keeps her up to date on trends in fashion, interests, and behavior.

"Research is a part of our consulting services, in terms of providing marketing and promotion to reach the young consumer, but we're not by any stretch of the imagination a research firm. Many of our methods are quite unorthodox, so it's sort of an education for a lot of our clients to see the way we gather our information."

To create the panel, Zandl went through her Rolodex and used many personal contacts to find 300 sons, daughters, cousins, nieces, nephews, and friends between the ages of 12 and 24. She got an 80% response rate to the first questionnaire and was able to expand the panel to its current size by asking panelists to hand out questionnaires to friends - practice she still employs to keep new participants coming in.

Panelists fill out a checklist of items purchased in the last six months - groceries, toiletries, clothing - and complete an "in/ out" section to show their tastes in music, food, clothing, and their favorite activities.

Though the panel has its share of kids from mainstream America, Zandl says her clients are most interested in what she calls "Alpha Kids," - trendsetters and early adopters who seem to have their fingers on the pulse of the country, who telegraph changes in societal and consumer trends.

Focus groups

For more in-depth information, she conducts focus groups, often contacting a panelist and asking him or her to gather the necessary number of friends who fit the client's demographic requirements and/or are users of certain products. Zandl says the spirited interplay between respondents in these groups frequently surprises clients who observe them.

"They'll say, 'Why are these people so animated?' They can't believe how forthcoming they are, but because they're with their friends, the kids can be totally open and disagree with each other, so you get so much more out of the group.

"Clients are also sometimes concerned that if (the respondents) are friends, they'll just reflect each other's views, but that's not the case. Clients are surprised that these kids can be friends and be so different."

When possible, Zandl says she likes to conduct the groups in participants' homes because of the valuable con text it provides.

"It makes people more comfortable and gives you a way to gauge the situation that the kids are growing up in. One of the things about people you meet in focus groups is that you have no idea where they're coming from, what their background is."

Remarkably cynical

Zandl says that since kids are not set in their ways yet, they are more inclined to be excited by the novelty of a product or a promotion than an older consumer. But, she adds, they are also remarkably cynical about certain things.

"Through the media, they've had much more exposure to what they call 'scams.' I think what they respond to are messages where they sense there is some semblance of integrity; that's often missing. For example, they respond to Nike advertising and products because they sense that everything about them is appropriate; the people in the ad are hip and it makes sense that these people would be using the product. (Nike) uses hip people and makes them hip, as opposed to just signing up somebody who's on the top of the charts. That has a lot of meaning for kids."

Zandl credits her rapport with kids to the fact that she's not judgmental. Few people ask kids questions out of curiosity, she says, and when they do, it's either to make fun of them, or from a parental point of view - "What are you wearing that for?" This is where her cultural view of the youth market comes into play.

"If you were in a totally different culture and you saw somebody wearing something unusual, you wouldn't deride it, you would be interested in knowing what its origins are. What does it mean? That's how I look at it. To me, it's just eternally fascinating."