Dialing Into the Youth Market

DIALING INTO YOUTH MARKET
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Camille Ricketts camille.ricketts@wsj.com]
Teenagers share details of their interests, their email addresses and even their phone numbers with others online. This behavior may concern their parents -- but it is great news for European cellphone companies. Mobile-service providers and phone makers are looking to capitalize on the trend with a host of new services and products for the 14-to-20 crowd, designed to encourage them to swap and move information and photos from their phones to the Web. Phone companies realize that teens, if asked, will provide information about themselves, and, armed with this data, the companies can tailor products for the teen market. Teens already are lucrative cellphone customers and potentially will become more so, especially in Europe, where they have been early to latch onto trends like mobile text messaging. In the United Kingdom alone, 99% of 15- to 19-year-olds had cellphones last year, according to MobileYouth, a London market-research firm. They spent $202.9 million on downloadable content and $570 million on text messages.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115456296027925167.html?mod=todays_us_ma...
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