Death Of The Teenager, 2018

Death Of The
Teenager
Is the teen cultural
experience in demise?
If so, what does it mean for
self-identity? And what's
the relevance for brands?
A cultural forecasting report by
Crowd DNA
Crowd DNA | Cultural Insights & Innovation
London, Amsterdam, New York
hello@crowdDNA.com | www.crowdDNA.com

Teen culture, the model created in the 1950s and evolved thereafter,
looks set for paradigm change in the decades ahead. Young people
are connecting with culture - also hitting puberty - at an earlier age.
And once teen-specific behaviours and need-states now linger
resiliently across older generations.
This could have a major impact on how self-identity is arrived at, and
in turn what people want from brands. Given that the marketing
communications industry has long been fixated on youth, leveraging
teenage tropes and typologies to commercial advantage, the
relevance for creative and strategy could be significant.
In this Crowd DNA cultural forecasting report, we explore what's
driving the changes and fundamentally shifting teen culture as we
know it today and have done for the last 70+ years.
We hope you find this work both useful and thought-provoking.
We'd be happy to discuss it further…
Andy Crysell, group managing director (London, Amsterdam, New York)
Death Of The Teenager, 2018

There’s Gens X, Y
and Z - but who’s
next?*
*Yes, we know that deﬁning by generational cohort annoys
some but stick with us…

Generation Alpha -
those who’ll live into
the 22nd Century
and who, very likely,
will form their
identities in very
diﬀerent ways to
what we’re used to.

These are those born –
shudder – from 2010 onwards.
The word of the year that year
was ‘app’. It was the year the
iPad came out; the year of
WikiLeaks. Death Of The Teenager, 2018

This is the ﬁrst truly 21st Century
generation.
More head spinning still, this is a
generation that will survive, in
signiﬁcant numbers, deep into the
22nd Century.

And what a time of change no doubt
lies in store for them. Futurist Ray
Kurzweil talks about human history’s
Law Of Accelerating Returns – wherein
social change, cultural change,
technological change, all kinds of
change – and the rate at which it
happens can only do one thing, and
that thing is to get faster and faster
and faster.*
*And based on this principle, he believes that the 21st Century will witness 1,000 times the
progress of the 20th Century. This means that if we were to travel forwards through time, say,
40 years, we’d be about equally as astonished as someone from the 1700s would be visiting
our world today.

Generation Alpha is likely to experience a lot; more than our 20th
Century minds can imagine.
But one thing that we question is whether they will have the
teen experience of the kind embarked on by previous
generations – something distinct, with a sense of diﬀerence over
what comes before and what comes afterwards in life, and that
plays a major role in identity formation.

The teenage experience, the
one embedded in our society
for almost a hundred years, is
most likely coming to an end.

Before we go forwards, let's go back…
It's hotly debated but there’s reasonable support
for the notion that the teenage experience, teen
culture as opposed to just being aged between 13
and 19, ﬁrst materialised in the early 20th Century,
when a period of education became compulsory
and/or was lengthened in many countries.

This meant teens were spending a greater
time almost exclusively in the company of
other teens and therefore creating their own
codes and behaviours.
So what was established as a way to
encourage formal learning also instigated all
of those pesky sub-cultural things about
youth that the establishment ultimately came
to treat with apprehension and fear.


The teenage experience really got on a roll by the time of the
boomer generation. Thereafter followed an ever-increasing
fragmentation of the experience – new tribes, new codes.


Across the last
decade there’s been
myriad micro tribes
– from sea punks to
ghetto goths,
townies to blingers –
you make your
choice, or blend a
few together if you
prefer.
There’s been pick
and mix adventuring
through near endless
tribal options.


From the 1990s onwards the teen experience,
youth culture, has been ﬁrmly in the sights of
brands – it’s become something to leverage and
make money from.
Brands both took ideas from youth culture and
sold the dream of youth culture. The teen
experience had gravitated from something to be
treated with suspicion to something to be sold
and sold hard.

For Gen Z, our youngest cohort
this side of Generation Alpha,
there is now FOMO and FOBO –
the fear of missing out and its
close friend, the fear of being
oﬄine.
Both of these refer to the
absolute essential nature of
always being in the loop,
culturally and socially super-
connected


It’s been a pretty
eventful journey for the
teen. But Generation Alpha
– how will it work for
them?

2023 is the year that the ﬁrst of this generation will become
teenagers.
Will they notice? Of course they will notice being 13, but will they
notice the teen experience? Will it be distinct from what went
before and what comes afterwards. Quite likely not and here’s a few
reasons why…

Unless a dramatic change in societal
norms take place this is a generation
that will gain more access to more
culture at a younger age than ever
before. Exposure to digital means
young people are starting to carve
individual tastes and create diﬀerent
identities at ever younger ages - way
before their teens.

Children are exposed to
marketing concepts earlier than
ever before. And when the
devices are wearable or the
access to information is
embedded in new, currently
undreamt of ways, culture, sub-
culture, will connect with them
sooner still.


The changes are physical, too.
Youth are becoming teens earlier –
evidence states puberty in 1920
started at 14.6 years – today it’s
10.5 years.

And just as compulsory
education was one of the
instigators of the teenage
experience in the ﬁrst
place, it’s likely education
will play a role in the
demise of the distinct
experience, too.
Increases in online
learning and mixed age
learning models will mean
less time spent speciﬁcally
with those of the same age
as you – less time creating
those codes.

Each of these
considerations will
weaken the sense of the
teen experience as a
distinct, identity-forming
experience just that little
bit more. But if first
becoming a teen is less of
a specific event – then
becoming an adult*, at the
other end of one’s teen
years, is even less of an
event too.
*Adults, as you may have
noticed, are already finding it
hard to leave behind the
trappings of the teen
experience – witness so
called middle youth; witness
everyone clinging on to a
little bit, or possibly quite a
lot, of youth culture.

Traditional indicators of adulthood –
moving out, marriage, buying the ﬁrst
home, they’re all becoming more
distorted, less uniform. And so the lines
become more blurred still. Where the
teenage experience starts and where it
ends will most likely be near impossible
to pinpoint.

But what does it mean if the
teen experience is no longer
seen, as presently deﬁned by
psychologists, as a critical
period of identity formation,
in which we overcome
uncertainty, and grow more
self-aware of our strengths
and weaknesses.
And does it matter?


It does matter, because what is
indisputable is that our identities will
still have to come from somewhere. We
will need identity!

Does it actually matter? It does matter,
because what is indisputable is that our
identities will still have to come from
somewhere. We will need identity!
By the time of Generation Alpha the
mode will, quite likely, be one of
perpetual beta. Rather than thinking in
terms of the ﬁnished adult, emerging
good-to-go, ready for the next stage of
life at the end of our teenage years,
perpetual beta will see a greater
understanding that identity cannot be
formed overnight – nor even in seven
teenage years.

Now it would be convenient to
proclaim this change irrefutably as a
good news or bad news story. But we
cannot – the best we can probably
do is say it will be exciting,
challenging and, most of all, very
diﬀerent.

There will no doubt be considerable pressures to
contend with – not least the necessity to protect
childhood; something it seems we are yet to form a
collective view on.
But, more positively, there may also be less of a
perceived rush to form ourselves. Less stock held in
the idea of anything akin to the ﬁnished adult
product ever emerging – which, seeing as that’s an
idea which has proven itself pretty dismally ﬂawed
thus far can be no bad thing.

If, as seems likely, we will all be living
that little bit longer, then it makes sense
for Generation Alpha to lock down the
details just that little bit less quickly.

It would be easy to revel in nostalgia for a golden vision of the
teen experience, the one played out for decades in ﬁlms and
music. But while those experiences have served us well for
close to 100 years, it may well be time to move on.
It’s apt then, after the Xs, the Ys and the Zs, to think of
Generation Alpha as a true re-set of youth.

When there’s 1,000 times the change
on the horizon, the cultural codes are
certain to change, too. For Generation
Alpha, a whole lot of code making and
code breaking doubtless lies ahead.

Death Of The Teenager:
Brand Implications
+ If your brand leverages the embedded codes of teen culture, and the teen experience, this
will likely need a re-boot
+ If your brand sees teen years as the gateway stage to product /category adoption, this
thinking may need updating
+ If your brand has different strategies for teen and 20-something consumers, this could
benefit from a re-think
+ If your brand looks to target families, perhaps the role of pre-teens in the decision making
requires a refresh
+ If your brand creates content for audiences aged pre-teens-to-21, it might not be fit-for-
purpose in times ahead

Launched in 2008, Crowd DNA is a cultural
insights and innovation business delivering
commercial advantage for leading brands across
45+ markets.
Combining researchers with strategists, writers,
designers and ﬁlm-makers, we have oﬃces in
London, Amsterdam and New York, and work to
three core principles: better thinking | being agile |
ensuring impact.
Crowd DNA | Cultural Insights & Innovation
London, Amsterdam, New York
hello@crowdDNA.com | www.crowdDNA.com

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