Zollo, Peter (F.) 1954-

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ZOLLO, Peter (F.) 1954-

PERSONAL:

Born September 1, 1954, in Chicago, IL; son of Burt M. and Lois Ann (Clonick) Zollo; married Debbie Fisch, June 26, 1977; children: Benjamin, Sarah, James. Education: Drake University, B.A, 1976.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Highland Park, IL. Office—Teenage Research Unlimited, 707 Skokie Blvd., Seventh Floor, Northbrook, IL 60062.

CAREER:

Discovery Publishing Co., Tucson, AZ, marketing director, 1977-80; Pattis Group, Lincolnwood, IL, marketing coordinator, 1980-81; Court Club Sports Magazine, Palatine, IL, director of marketing communications, 1981-82; Teenage Research United, Lake Forest, IL, cofounder and vice president, 1982-83; Teenage Research Unlimited (TRU), Northbrook, IL, consultant, 1984-87, executive vice president, 1987, president, 1988—. Public speaker; researcher and consultant for groups, including Truth Campaign, American Legacy Foundation, and Centers for Disease Control; member, Columbia University expert panel on youth and tobacco; member, Behavioral Change Expert Panel. Has appeared on network news programs, including CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, Real Life with Jane Pauley, Good Morning America, CNN Morning News, ABC World News Tonight, and What Makes Teens Tick (ABC prime-time special). Co-inventor, "Trivia-Sense" (game), 1983, and "800: The College Prep Game," 1985.

MEMBER:

American Marketing Association, American Demographic Institute, Chicago Media Research Club.

WRITINGS:

Wise up to Teens: Insights into Marketing and Advertising to Teenagers, New Strategist Publications (Ithaca, NY), 1995, 2nd edition, 1999.

Getting Wiser to Teens: More Insights into Marketing to Teenagers, New Strategist Publications (Ithaca, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS:

Peter Zollo is one of the world's foremost authorities on teen trends and marketing directed at young people. "His privately held Northbrook [Illinois] firm … sells insights to companies such as MTV, Nike and Proctor & Gamble, which market products to teens," stated Susan Chandler in the Chicago Tribune. In Wise up to Teens: Insights into Marketing and Advertising to Teenagers, and its sequel, Getting Wiser to Teens: More Insights into Marketing to Teenagers, Zollo describes approaches to tracing and anticipating the wants, desires, and buying habits of teenagers. "Young people are particularly receptive to messages that promise either a new experience or one that satisfies a need-state that's unique to this age group," Zollo explained in Crain's Chicago Business. "But they're also adept at blocking out messages they deem false or misdirected." Teens, as a group, can hold long-term grudges against brands that fail to deliver on the promises they make, Zollo added, and are very suspicious of variations in the tone and delivery of advertising messages.

Zollo's expertise can be seen in areas other than predicting teen trends for the advertising marketers. Because of his longtime familiarity with the teen market—Zollo helped found the company he heads, Teenage Research Unlimited, back in the early 1980s—he has been called upon to serve on committees designed to break dangerous habits among teenagers, including smoking, drinking, drug abuse, and unprotected sex. Zollo has consulted with anti-tobacco campaigns in states ranging from Massachusetts and Florida to Oregon and California, and he has also worked with the national Centers for Disease Control to try to find anti-smoking messages that will work among teens. "Too many teens," he told Bob Herguth in the Chicago Sun-Times, "believe they're invincible, and obviously they're not." In addition, Zollo has examined the trend by marketers to place creative advertisements aimed directly at teens in school classrooms. Such in-school or even in-class messages, Zollo told Carrie Goerne in Marketing News, are effective in reaching their audiences because they are virtually impossible to ignore—but, at the same time, they may not result in the desired increases in sales because teens can view them as intrusions.

Zollo asserts that teens are an extremely important part of the American marketplace, and according to some reports they consumed almost $100 billion in consumer products by 2000. That figure represented a jump of about a third during the last decade of the century, from 1991 to 1998. The numbers keep increasing as teens take money earned from part-time jobs or wheedled from parents and pump it back into the economy. With such huge amounts of cash involved, keeping track of where teens want to spend their money—and, more importantly, where they will want to spend their money next—has become big business. Zollo's books help marketers and policymakers alike understand how to sell goods and ideas to teenagers. R.R. Attinson, writing in Choice, called the second edition of Zollo's first book "an indispensable resource for information on the teen market."