I have narrowed my terms of reference for my project to deal with design pertaining to girls, purposefully dealing with the same group of people in the developed world as targeted in tween marketing campaigns, “tween” being defined for in my study, as preteens aged between eight and twelve inclusive. The tween group is also a relatively neologistic and clearly delineated focus group for the purposes of marketing of consumables, generally understood within this context to be children motivated strongly desire to be teenaged, yet still developmentally and socially being children.
I intend to subvert the aims of tween marketing, by packaging my thesis work in a form that presents like the other media, play, and entertainment options for girls in its appeal, yet defaults on the key objective of tween marketing for girls – to encourage a lifetime of consumption at any cost. Simply put, my project will harness the key lessons of tween marketing in order to provide girls, and their parents, with a beneficial entertainment media alternative.
The primary concern of these media, will be design and the fullest use of a graphic interface to engage and challenge the child, and to cross various media forms such as printed material - magazines or a book, and digital media – the internet. This generational approach will enable my project to be across many of the same areas that traditional tween marketing is positioned.
I have deliberately harnessed the word “sanctuary” in my definition to identify the duality of a place of worship (in this sense referencing the power of the advertising image and the marketing machine to inspire brand loyalty or a fan base in the tween demographic) and a safe place, a refuge from harm. I hope to achieve both in the generative phase of my research.
2 comments:
Thanks Kell, for the invitation to read your Blog. It's a nice idea to do this, rather like thinking aloud perhaps but with a potential for dialogue. Suggestion: the definition of your market for study, the tween girls, could be further limited by culture, language, geography?
Michael
It's a move to get writing down, in a place where I can modify it, hear feedback, and be relatively loose about how I frame things while they're still in development.
Your comments are always appreciated.
Your feedback regarding more finite definition the tween girl demographic for investigation/framing is spot-on. I will give it some thought, and post about it in the next day or so.
In the broadest sense I know that I will be delaing with English speaking girls in the West (by the modern definition which currently includes Japan), more specifically and immediately Australian girls.
I'll go into this more shortly...
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