Brands That Young Women Love Most

By Steven Perlberg, Business Insider

In what has to be the best collaboration between equity researchers and a teenage fashion magazine, Goldman Sachs has joined forces with Teen Vogue to produce the definitive "Teen Vogue-Goldman Sachs Brand Affinity Index."

"Over the next 5 years, millennials are expected to ascend at the expense of boomers in apparel consumption, increasing spending by 20-25%," writes Goldman's Lindsay Drucker Mann. "But they do so with less financial backing, according to data from various sources: lower incomes than preceding generations, and less inclination to use credit cards."

Millennials — those born between 1980 and 2000 — will therefore be more "discriminating shoppers," and brands will have to compete more heavily in terms of product and messaging. To find the top 50 brands, Goldman "polled over 1,200 Teen Vogue 'It Girls' on roughly 350 brands. Respondents scored brands based on awareness, favorability, and word-of-mouth" — an important facet in our social media world where peer opinion is more easily available. The composite index measured the average of those three scores, excluding brands with low favorability scores (where favorability was one standard deviation below the mean).

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