The buying and spending habits of tweens and teenagers across the globe would be valuable market research for sellers of online games, brand-name clothing, personal electronics, music CDs and other youth market lifestyle products.

Gathering a reasonable cross-section of international respondents in the targeted youth group would also be a massive research effort that would probably take months to plan and implement.

Yet, a Finnish company, Sulake, did all the above in only two weeks. Sulake had already created a virtual world for teens in the late 1990s called Habbo. It is a trusted site among teenaged users worldwide. So, Sulake had no difficulties getting responses from youth in 22 countries.

In fact, the virtual world developer from Helsinki found 42,000 teens were eager to participate; and they felt comfortable revealing spending habits and preferences to Habbo virtual world avatars.

Some virtual teen findings on music preferences:

· British teens prefer rap and hip-hop music over any other music styles

· Japanese youth prefer pop music

· Brazilian teens and tweens prefer rock

“Trend watching in virtual worlds makes sense for any business in today’s environment,” said Robyn Waters, a former trend and product developer for Target stores who now runs a trend-watch agency. According to Waters: Interacting in a virtual world is not simply a trend for the teen and tween-aged group; rather it is their life. Trend watchers take note.