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In Europe, pre-fab pop group the Spice Girls was a tie-in marketing machine, uniting adolescent girls and the marketers pursuing them in a media frenzy of "girl power." In the U.S., they weren't. Here's a look into the dynamics of pop phenomena and their interface with commercial culture.
The videogame market in Europe has been growing by more than 100% a year. And yet, as in the U.S., there exists a glaring hole in usage by demographics. The market is made up predominantly of 16-24-year-old males, not surprising when one looks at the range of games on sale: sports titles, shoot-'em-ups, fast cars and ludicrously wellendowed cartoon babes. But when Sony released the Spice Girls vidgame for its PlayStation system this past summer, something changed. "Retailers report that our games tend to be almost exclusively bought by men," said Alan Welsman, European marketing director for Sony PlayStation. "But when we launched this game, the majority of customers have been mothers and daughters."
Introduced in June, the game is already out of stock in the U.K. It sold 75,000 units in its first two months, a figure comparable to the lifetime sales of standard game, and just hit the street in the U.S. "As well as strong sales, we estimate that around 20% of the girls who bought the game will also have had to buy the hardware on which to play it," said Welsman. "This means we have widened our audience long-term, preparing the ground for a new range of games with a broader appeal."
For all their music-purist detractors, the Spice Girls' wile as a marketing vehicle may lie squarely in the Sony model. Yes, the group was built on fashion models in garish, scanty clothing, prefabricated to be a pop sensation and fantasy for MTV-watching boys; and yet, their phenomenon came off as eerily post-structural: a post-feminist quintet of "bims" who practiced extroverted niceness on stage in the name of a brand of feminine empowerment dubbed "girl power." Call it "Babe's Lib." The strange entity struck a chord at a time when corporate marketers had been searching for solid points of pop-cultural interface with pre-teen and young teen girls, a quest that has seen its share of hits and misses in recent...