This morning NBC’s Today Show featured a segment on “Spending Power: Today’s Brand Savvy Tweens.”

Martin Lindstrom, author of “Buyology – Truth and Lies About Why We Buy,” created a focus group of boys and girls ranging from 9 to 11. The kids were asked to perform several tasks and identify the brands they were interacting with.

The first activity was “listen”: Lindstrom played a series of music clips associated with big name brands, such as Nintendo Wii, NBC, and Apple.

The second activity involved smell: Lindstrom had each child smell an object, then call out the responses in unison. When asked to smell Play-Doh, one participant remarked, “Every kid knows that!”

The third activity involved a collage board: Kids were asked to identify the brand based on a partially exposed logo. Even a “scantily clad” image of a male abdomen was correctly identified by some as an ad for retail chain Abercrombie & Fitch (A&F).

After the experiments, Lindstrom had a discussion with the kids about clothing. It was amazing to see how perceptive and aware these kids are of social constructs. One girl in the focus group said that there’s a girl at her school  — “that no one likes” — who makes fun of people’s clothing by saying, “Where’d you get that? The 99-cent store?” And yet, when Lindstrom asked how they would perceive a child only dressed in Walmart brand clothing, the kids all scoffed, saying that it suggested that the person had no money. When asked how they would perceive someone wearing only A&F, they were still unsatisfied — accusing that person to be haughty and a show-off.

The “good news, if you can call it that,” Lindstrom says in an interview with co-host Matt Lauer, is that as savvy as tweens are about brands, they’re extremely critical as well, a challenge marketers are still trying to grapple with.

One technique that seems to be working is peer pressure. According to Lindstrom, 67 percent of tweens wear the right label out of fear of being teased, and more than 1/3 are teased. Leveraging this mentality, brands are paying students to talk up brands and influence their peers.

Additional stats on tween consumers:

• Tweens represent $43 billion in spending power.
• 70 percent of tweens want a credit card.
• On average, they watch 40,000 television commercials annually.