Rating: 
Summary: The Seduction of America's Youth
Review: Alissa Quart describes how America's youth have been successfully targeted with methods today's kids can't resist. In fact, sometimes it is the parents who encourage their children to become 'branded'. The clothes they demand, the makeup they use, even the colleges they want to attend; all must be brand names. The hard sell is everywhere: magazine and TV ads are the most obvious, but the movies and music videos they watch, even the video games they play feature brand name items in glamorous settings. Our children succumb to the need to be like the movie stars and pop singers. It is not enough to want to wear the same brands as the stars and models, they crave to be look-alikes. Thus, teenagers are demanding cosmetic surgeries as never before. Craving to be super thin, some resort to starving themselves (anorexia). The girls want liposection and bodily enhancements; the boys want to be more muscular and powerful. Dangerous medications and surgeries are comsumed in ever increasing numbers by our young generation. This eye-opening book tells the story. No child is too young to be a target.
Rating:
Summary: The Seduction of America's Youth
Review: Alissa Quart describes how America's youth have been successfully targeted with methods today's kids can't resist. In fact, sometimes it is the parents who encourage their children to become 'branded'. The clothes they demand, the makeup they use, even the colleges they want to attend; all must be brand names. The hard sell is everywhere: magazine and TV ads are the most obvious, but the movies and music videos they watch, even the video games they play feature brand name items in glamorous settings. Our children succumb to the need to be like the movie stars and pop singers. It is not enough to want to wear the same brands as the stars and models, they crave to be look-alikes. Thus, teenagers are demanding cosmetic surgeries as never before. Craving to be super thin, some resort to starving themselves (anorexia). The girls want liposection and bodily enhancements; the boys want to be more muscular and powerful. Dangerous medications and surgeries are comsumed in ever increasing numbers by our young generation. This eye-opening book tells the story. No child is too young to be a target.
Rating: 
Summary: Good concept, but not totally engaging
Review: Alissa Quart tackles an admirable and potentially fascinating subject in Branded, yet I was left feeling a bit disappointed after finishing the book. I personally found her writing style a bit stilted, and it seems like there is a lot of information and many observations, yet not so much in-depth analysis. The book itself is not extremely long, so there is definitely room for more expansion. There are countless examples of teen branding in movies, fashion, magazines, advertisements, etc., and the author touches on all of these and more, but somehow the book felt more like a bombardment of information than a nuanced analysis. I had pretty high expectations when I read this book (especially from the many positive editorial reviews available), but it was ultimately not as satisfying an experience as I would have hoped.
Rating: 
Summary: "Corporate pedophilia" and your children
Review: Alissa Quart's "Branded" explores how America's youth are increasingly subjected to sophisticated but ultimately predatory forms of corporate marketing and branding. While the social reproduction of labor has been defined by capitalist requirements for many years, Ms. Quart amply demonstrates that the co-optation of today's youth has deepened and intensified. For many, the immersion in consumerism is so all-encompassing that it threatens to corrupt and corrode their mental self-images and possibly inhibit their ability to function as enlightened citizens. Ms. Quart shows that the marketing tactics used are often invasive and unscrupulous, amounting to a sort of "corporate pedophilia" whose aim is to grow the corporate bottom line at the expense of childhood itself. Indeed, the author explains that whole classes of products (such as sexually-provocative undergarments designed for pre-teen girls) are unapologetically marketed to ever-younger children, thereby accelerating the pace at which children develop, perceive and interact with their surroundings. Ms. Quart blasts the justifications used by marketers to defend such indefensible actions and alerts us to the moral vacuousness that lies at the heart of the corporate agenda. Ms. Quart argues that our children bear unmistakable psychological, physical and financial scars from this assault. Media-induced anxiety leads boys to steroid abuse and girls to anorexia; social acceptance is garnered by the flaunting of expensive designer clothes and accessories; class status is predicated by admission to brand-name colleges; and so on. The end result is a hyper-competitive, anxious and debt-ridden generation of youths who collectively are getting locked into the cycle of labor and consumption at a significantly earlier age than their predecessors. It may be true that Ms. Quart's work depends heavilly on observations drawn from the ranks of upper middle-class society, but she has impressively succeeded in describing a phenomenon that has largely eluded others. The reader is impressed by the author's ability to synthesize scholarly research, pop culture, business information, anecdotes and first-person interviews to make her case. In short, this is original and cutting-edge research that should give inquisitive readers much to ponder. I recommend this book to parents of teenagers (like myself) who want to understand more about the brave new world their children are inhabiting as well as to teenagers who want to critically deconstruct and reclaim their branded selves.
Rating:
Summary: Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers
Review: Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers by Alissa Quart is a disturbing expose over how the market has totally hogtied teens into buying expensive brands that they have no real need for. I am all for free eneterprize. However, there has to be some morals involved with this as well. To sell to children (teens are big kids) is revolting and very cheap.
Rating:
Summary: Fresh and Disturbing Take on a Rather Tired Argument
Review: I found it to be an excellent read, and I'm considering using some excerpts from it to spark writing and discussion in a basic writing class that I teach--a class where I'm always concerned that the readings I use are immediate, accessable and read well.
Although the book's subject is the way that companies market to teenagers, in a sense this is only a subset of the author's larger concern with capitalism and consumer culture. She obviously has a left wing take on this subject, although I disagree with earlier reviewers that her presentation is manipulative or unfair. The issue isn't whether or not companies fill a demand (obviously, they do), but about the lengths to which they go to create that demand. How you feel about this obviously depends on your politics, but Quart's viewpoint seems to me to be reasonable and valid.
My problem is that this argument is just sort of tired. I'm just bored of hearing the same critique of "consumer culture" over and over again. What sets this book apart, though is its focus on marketing to children, and, in particular, the passages where Quart presents the kids' lives through their own words. It's pretty disturbing to hear how closely they identify their own self-worth with the products that they use. I'm not just talking about the idea that they have to conform to a certain image in order to be beautiful--again, this is old news. But about how the almost BECOME the brand that they use. When a teenager named Carrie, a fan of MTV's "Total Request Live" describes her loyalty to that show and to the marketing she does for The Backstreet Boys by saying, "I like the Boys as much as my friends and family"--well, there's something really disturbing about that.
Rating: 
Summary: Poor little Alissa, tell us how your really feel!!
Review: I have worked in the marketing world for many years, and specialize in marketing to the youth culture. I have a hard time reading a book that was written purely upon opinion (there is an entire chapter dedicated to "Media" and the author ends up discussing her favorite and least favorite moves of the 80's??). Let take a moment and asks this generation what it thinks about companies marketing to them. I have a feeling you will find that most appreciate that fact that their thoughts and creative ideas really matter. It appears this author has been hurt in the past by people who were more popular than her, and this is her way of lashing out (woe is me, woe is me, I won't give into being branded, seems to be her only point) Might I remind the author that if it was not for large companies taking the time to listen to Teens and Tweens our economy and country would be in a far different place? Overall the book is shallow, and a waste of time, I would recommend not wasting your money.
Rating:
Summary: Seduction of the Innocent
Review: In accessible, often witty prose, Quart shows the corrupting effect that the conscienceless pursuit of profit by corporate marketers has on everything from young girls' body images or young boys'understandings of what it means to be masculine, to the complaisant administrations of public schools. "Seduction of the innocent" is not too strong a term to apply to the corporate behavior that Quart describes; though happily she also focuses on the ways in which many young people have begun to resist being "branded." As an account of the impact of corporatism on daily lives, this book belongs on the shelf next to Naomi Klein's No Logo. It will only not appeal to those who make a living exploiting young people; most others will find it a revelation.
Rating:
Summary: Good examination of consumer culture
Review: Quart does an excellent job of disecting the corporate world's exploitation of children and teenagers. This book could have been just another indictment against advertising, but Quart examines multiple aspects of brand-mania. I especially liked how she includes a chapter on "brand-name" colleges and universities (this is not just about sneakers and jeans, folks). I do have a few criticisms. As some other reviewers pointed out, she mostly interviews upper class teens. Young folks who can't afford to buy Gucci and Prada won't see themselves in this book. Quart also engages in some handwringing over the poor innocent children (see the chapter on teen authors), which I think was a little insulting. Overall though, I recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Anti-business propaganda desguised as sociology
Review: There are two different ways in which this book may be rated: firstly, from the perspective of its contents, ideas, and accuracy - secondly, from the perspective of being an interesting read. On both accounts, the books scores one star at best.
As far as content is concerned, the main idea of this book revolves around the frustration the author has carried from her teenage years into adulthood in terms of her lack of financial resources to have what other teenagers had. Throughout the first chapters, the author vomits her anger for not being able to have and wear the labels her cool friends had and wore. This can only be described as resentment - she was not making a choice; rather, she could not access what she wanted. The rest of the book is dedicated to criticizing what marketing does, which is undertanding the needs and wants of consumers. From this perspective, we may also argue that businesses are trying to satisfy a demand, and that consumers are willing to pay a premium for having such demands met. However, the author pushes a left-wind agenda and interprets such a marketing approach as "exploiting" consumers. From then on, the books delves into a never ending tirade.
The second perspective this books may be analysed from is one of entertaining value. The books also scores a "fail" - in the pursuit of relent criticism, the topics are analysed in a very boring fashion.
Prospective readers trying to read some sensasionalistic, tabloid-style discourse are better served by getting Noami Klein, of Germaine Greer, or any other left-wing, socialist writer - at least, those authors write more stylish and fashionable nonsensical garbage.
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