THE UNIVERSAL TEENAGER
By Shawn Tully

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Cutting a wide, free-spending path through the churning world market is a consumer culture more powerful than being American or French, African American or Asian. It's the scary, experimental passage of growing up a teenager. Increasingly, kids form a global community. Anointed by common trendsetters -- currently, their black peers in America's inner cities -- fashions circle the globe with sorcerous speed. Kids spend their money on the same videogames, music, and clothes, idolize a single roster of heroes, and gyrate to identical sounds. BSB, the U.S. ad agency, videotaped teenagers' bedrooms from Los Angeles to Jakarta. The result: a practically universal unisex sanctuary stocked with Nike footwear, Levi's jeans, and Sega videogames. Consumer goods companies are aggressively targeting this vast, rich market, which older teens everywhere keep primed with part-time jobs. Last year America's 27.5 million teenagers alone spent $100 billion, 30% more than in 1989. Almost half of U.S. teens own their own TVs. Even so, you might not want to be one of them. Today's teens still battle with their parents, cherish their friends, and try on new identities to see if they fit, just as they always have. But beyond those basics, these kids are a new breed. More come from single homes. Few have a sense of physical security: AIDS, an ailing planet, and gang violence, not an American exclusive, pose constant danger. To their credit, they yearn to cure the ills they've inherited and to embrace other cultures -- and, as the first computer-literate generation, use their PCs to talk via the Internet. Business strives to capture this market, and has learned lessons along the way. Levi Strauss found that teens like products that project a steady, genuine image, Eastman Kodak that teenage girls like to lavish photos on their friends. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola is conducting a multiyear marketing study called ''The Global Teenager'' that it hopes will define what the 13- to 19-year- old customer wants for years to come.