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This week, it says, it was announced that Galeries Lafayette, the department store, is to open a section dedicated to 15 to 25 year-olds. Elsewhere, H&M has announced that it will unveil the first of a change of stores aimed at younger females later this month.

Lafayette VO: targeting the teenage wallet

The reason for this fevered activity is the growing purchasing power of this section of the population. Accounting for 13% of consumers, it accounts for 26% of all purchases of clothing. Take a broader view and look at the 11-25 age group, Le Monde says, and you are talking about €33 billion in spending power - up 35% over the past 5 years.

According to the research agency, l'Institut de l'enfant, a young shopper's annual budget averages €830, without factoring in the contribution of parents. And Galeries Lafayette are not the only ones to have realised the potential gain. Zara, for example, is looking to set aside spaces in its stores for this age group while La Redoute, the mail order company, has increased the number of pages in its catalogue given over to products for 15-25 year-olds by 65%.

"Younger buyers are of particular importance", Bernard de Talhouët, head of La Redoute, tells the paper. "They bring with them a modern image and are able to exert a strong influence on other buyers' behaviour".

"Companies love to embrace today what they rejected beforehand", counters Joël-Yves Le Bigot, head of Génération 2020, which specialises in studies of younger consumers. "Until the beginning of the 1990s, adolescents were considered to be an unstable target market in which you couldn't really invest. Since then, they've realised that they're missing out on several million potential clients".

As a result, companies have been equipping themselves with the means to understand their new audience. "You can't just mimic their attitudes", Paul Delaoutre, MD of Galeries Lafayette, tells Le Monde. "That's why we handed over responsibility to young designers and marketing specialists. Certain brands, he adds, launch limited editions in order to create a phenomenon of not being able to get hold of the product. Others practise 'street marketing', dressing 'opinion-leading' youngsters for free in order to create a trend.

The problem, however, is maintaining the relationship. "If a company just settles for the proposition that if young consumers get out their wallets, then they can get what they're looking for, then they're bound to fail", says Joël-Yves Le Bigot. "You have to establish a form of dialogue, propose corporate values which sit within the universe of the adolescent - turn their passions into possibilities.

Knowing how to do this, he cautions, isn't straightfoward. "Take Nokia mobile phones. Two years ago, they were cult objects, but they've since been supplanted by Samsung", says Joël Brée, professor of marketing at the Univeristy of Caen. "In the same way, Adidas was a 'has been' ten years ago. But since the victory of France in the 1998 World Cup, the brand - which sponsored the team - has become a brand that makes young people dream".

This can be a difficult target market to understand - if a product, for example, becomes too widely accepted, it can lose its appeal. And, in addition, there are no single, strong trends any more. "Thirty years ago", says Joël Brée, there was just one dominant trend, such as disco or punk. These days, you find 'micro-tribes' of adolescents with completely different interests." That makes it, Le Monde concludes, a rather attractive target market, but one that's also rather difficult to hang on to.

To visit the section of the Galeries Lafayette website dedicated to its new section - Lafayette V.O - just click here.