Younger audience is more susceptible to aspirational brand messaging - just look at TV ads for youngsters from few decades ago. Old farts are no longer trying to fit in, and in their purchases bring up terms like "lasting value" and "consumer reports".

A friend's son, a newly minted teenager a few years back, had a Logan Paul sweatshirt and T-shirt at the top of the birthday wishlist. Never mind that's it's a generic Old Navy casualware with the Logan Paul logo imprinted on it (and marked up accordingly).

Consumption habits are sticky. It's more effective to get a young person to like your product and they'll buy it across their working life than to try and convert someone already loyal to another brand

Not always true, it can backfire hard. I know zero 30 year olds wearing abercrombie, hollister, or american eagle today, although that was literally the only acceptable brands for them 15 years ago. Abercrombie still sprays that cologne in their stores, reminds you of stepping back into highschool or middleschool.

Right, so it is targeted at kids whose parents will buy these things for them.

Realistically I think it's probably targeted at anyone who's willing to [get someone to] spend money on it.

Conspicuous consumption has been a thing for ages, and it's always been about presenting an image as having enough disposable income to be able to buy these sorts of things. The fact that some kids have parents who can afford to lavish this stuff on them only adds to the mystique.

I'd argue that it's also inaccurate to characterize this as just a kids thing. Plenty of people my age and older dump money into brands like Rolex and Mercedes. The main difference I personally see is that the price tags are even higher, and the brands themselves turn over at a slower pace.

Conspicuous consumption started with the invention of Santa Claus. Rolex and Mercedes leverage the snob effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snob_effect

It's way older than that. There are ancient Greek philosophers who seemingly devoted their careers to criticizing the phenomenon. I would guess it goes even further back, but, past some point, writing down one's thoughts on the subject wouldn't have been available to anyone who might want to write down their thoughts on the subject.

One of the few named brands in the story is a fried chicken place. You don’t have to be rich to afford fried chicken. But fried chicken is a multi-billion-dollar industry.

And it’s an industry that is deeply dependent on advertising to maintain brand awareness and segment the market. All fried chicken tastes basically the same, so customers choose stores based on brand attributes.

Are you a Popeyes, KFC, or Chick-fil-A kind of person? Influencer marketing helps you figure it out and remember which place is the most desirable for you.

This sort of thing works on many people, but teenagers are especially susceptible to it.

> All fried chicken tastes basically the same

How many places have you had fried chicken in?

It’s an oversimplification for effect.

Yes, there’s bad fried chicken and good fried chicken. But when you’re hungry cruising down the commercial strip, there may be two national brands you need to quickly choose from. One of those brands comes out on top because their millions of ad spend got you in there once or twice and now they’re you’re favorite.

Source: we got chick-fil-a curbside many Saturdays last year but at least two other fried chicken places are closer and we generally eat much healthier food.

Some palates just aren’t as refined my friend

All mass market fried chicken tastes pretty similar.

That's not an improvement on the original claim at all. How many places have you had mass market fried chicken in?

Just sticking to a single brand, KFC in China uses a lot of red pepper. KFC in the US doesn't.

Lets agree to strongly disagree

You don't have to be rich to buy luxury goods. In fact most of them are bought by people who can't afford them but desperately want to own them. There's credit cards, parents, using all your disposable income on them since you don't pay rent, etc.

I recently read that half of Ferrari owners in the UK have a net worth of less than £1M.

Link to the source? That's a very interesting statistic

Right. The people who can actually afford $500 shoes aren't the ones buying Balenciaga sneakers that look like clown shoes. Actual wealthy people are generally not easily influenced suckers.

Yes they are, but they can afford to buy everything nice, not just a few ridiculous things.

Also, poor people aren't buying Lambos and crashing them.

> Actual wealthy people are generally not easily influenced suckers.

I think you only have to look at the truly high-end luxury market to see that that's not true. A _staggering_ amount is spent on absurd products that only multi-millionaires can afford. And they've very much doing it to one-up the other multi-millionaires.

The likes of watches that cost tens of thousands and cars that cost hundreds of thousands are generally actually-wealthy-person territory, say.

> Actual wealthy people are generally not easily influenced suckers

source? no, seriously. All the marketing I see for luxury products and more generally point to yes, rich people are exactly as suceptible to advertising to poor people, if not more so due to having a greater share of disposable income.

It's the ultimate in product placement. "Someone who looks just like how I want to look is using product X. I need to use my money (or my parent's money) to buy product X so all of the everyone will like me." It's an absolute no brainer for them to do this. It makes more sense to me than targeted advertising from FB/G/etc. These people have subscribers that voluntarily decided to follow them, and are guaranteed eyeballs on anything/everything they post.

I understand the advertising part of it, what I don't understand is who is actually spending the money.

The people who follow these sorts of TikTok influencers probably don't earn their own money. I guess parents are shelling out big time?

Every large corporation has an annual advertising/promotional budget. They hire ad agencies and PR firms to handle that work. These agencies would be the people I'd expect hiring/paying the influencers. I'm sure they have a group of young fresh out of college employees that do nothing but scour the web for influencers keep tabs on their followers, the type of content they produce, etc. When a campaign comes along, they fit the prodcut with the influencer and hope for success.

I meant from the customer side who is spending the money, because kids generally don't have that much discretionary income.

There are a million children in the USA whose parents are millionaires.

Non-poor American and European kids certainly have influence over how their parents spend money on them - almost all of them have discretion over which clothes and accessories are bought for them, if not how much money will be spent.

Saturday morning cartoons were invented to sell things to American kids (by way of them begging their parents).

One reason can be that they want to develop their branding as a long tail distribution of fans.

If you look online, you'll also find baby naming websites that e.g recommend your kid to be named like a Disney comic figure.

I can't pinpoint, of course, that this their motivation, but to me it'd make sense.

> What I don't understand is why brands throw so much money at very young influencers.

What I don't understand is that we, as a society, allow it.

Do you want to be the brand manager who said "nah, lets not bother with that" if it turns out it works?

In my view, children's advertising targets all children.

It's simple math. They will throw at whatever brings the highest ROI.

I think they might have older followers as well.