When it comes to technology, Arden Arnold is the go-to guy in his house.
Mulling over an emergency backup power generator for the family, he researched all the choices before picking a Black & Decker Corp. Storm Station. He's interested in a new desktop computer, but it needs to have at least an 80-gigabyte hard drive, 512 megabytes of RAM and "a pretty good video card." And he's trying to persuade his mother to switch from Microsoft Corp.'s Hotmail to Google Inc.'s Gmail service.
"She pays for 1 gigabyte of storage, but Gmail gives you more than 2 gigabytes for free," he said. "And it has a very intuitive search function."
Arden is just 12 years old. But the influence the San Francisco sixth-grader wields makes marketers take notice.
Technology and consumer electronics companies increasingly are crafting messages aimed at kids to pitch such big-ticket gadgetry as flat-panel televisions, personal computers or high-end stereos.
Kids can't afford much of the gear themselves, but the tech industry is wising up to what cereal makers, resort operators and even carmakers have long known: Even young children have an outsize say in how Mom and Dad spend their money.
With tech products, kids hold even more power because they may be the only ones in the house who understand how things work.
"Kids are really the chief technology officers of their households," said Jim Malcolm, senior marketing manager at Sony Electronics Inc. "They're the ones who have the answers and make the recommendations."
That's the case in the Eagle Rock home of Katrina Dela Cruz. The 11-year-old sixth-grader and her older brother make most of the tech decisions for the family. For starters, Katrina wants a personal computer "with Windows XP and a CD burner" so she can edit photos and create slideshows. She also has her eye on an iPod. And she's bugging her parents to buy a big-screen plasma TV.
What Katrina and her brother want holds considerable sway because her parents acknowledge that they are pretty clueless about technology.
"I didn't know anything about them or how they work," said Katrina's mother, Fevelyn.
By contrast, said youth marketer Greg Livingston, " 'Tweens' have grown up with technology; in sixth grade they're doing PowerPoint presentations. They're fearless about pushing the wrong buttons. In five minutes they'll know how to do more on your phone than you do."
