Joining The Sisterhood

Welcome to The Sisterhood blog, a forum for teenage girls and marketing professionals to exchange insights about what girls want and how marketers can give it to them.

It feels like a homecoming for me, since I’ve been working with teenagers almost since I was one myself. In 1989, I became president of a company that marketed career services to students through job fairs and a magazine. (The New York Times profiled me and said I “think young.”) In the 1990s, I organized focus groups at tweenager slumber parties for Levi’s and online for AOL, oversaw a daily viewer feedback system for the in-school TV network Channel One and was a key consultant on Esprit’s “What Would You Do to Change the World?” campaign, which cast Gwyneth Paltrow, then a student at UC Santa Barbara, in her first ad. I created the National Teen Summit for Clearasil, co-authored the Greetings from High School and Kids Online book series and was a creative consultant on Pepsi’s “It’s Like This” campaign, which ran on MTV in the early ’90s.

More recently, I reconnected with the teen market through the youth committee I helped pull together for the Bob Woodruff Foundation, which assists wounded warriors. Last year I launched the social-media-based fundraiser Tweet to ReMind.

But enough about me. I’ll be posting from time to time, but the point of this blog is to be a community—or, well, a Sisterhood—in which everyone gets to have her say and everyone is heard. Our contributors are a mix of teenage girls and marketing pros. Some postings will be for marketers about teen news, others by teens about teen life. We hope you’ll let us know what you think about both.

Our first two teen girl posts will be from Evelyn D., a 17-year-old at a private high school in Westchester County, N.Y., who helped us create The Sisterhood and will be working on it in the Euro PR offices this spring for her senior-year project, and her 16-year-old sister, Isabelle. They consider themselves best friends, share many friends (and clothes) and are very style-conscious yet also serious about the environment and the suffering in Darfur and Sudan. Evelyn and Isabelle helped me understand the powerful, intimate bond that teenage girls share with their sisters and best friends, and they are now serving as two of our 12 national spokespeople.

Another is Christine V., a 14-year-old freshman at a public high school in Nassau County, N.Y., with a special emphasis on music and the arts. She has been dancing since age 2 and is currently involved in drama, show choir, tap, jazz and ballet. She performs in several dance and theater productions a year and is rarely seen without her iPod.

I’m thrilled to have them on board.

We want you on board, too. Everyone from girls between the ages of 13 and 18 to marketing executives can join in. If you’d like to blog for us, see our guidelines. Here are some questions to get you started:

Why is a sister so sacred?

What’s the deal with teens and cell phones? Why are they always on? How much is too much?

What stresses you out, and what calms you down?