Caveat Emptor

Alice Moore was a huge Spice Girls fan, had all the records, magazines, "books", posters and videos. But then, as always happens, she became too old for them and looked around for a band which might be more appropriate for someone of her age group. Alice Moore is nine years of age. What particularly annoyed the English schoolgirl about The Spice Girls was that her little sister, aged four, had become a fan and Alice, displaying an impeccable sense of logic, decided that Scary, Sporty, Baby, Ginger and Posh just weren't "cool enough" any more.

The demographics might do for the band yet: the familiar pattern of take-up with acts like The Spice Girls stems from the "aspirational" ideals of 11 to 13-year-olds who are new to the "wannabee" way of things. Carried away by an initial wave of commodity fetishism, they are none too discriminating with their purchasing power. The problem begins when younger friends and siblings begin to imitate their behaviour, thus lessening the exclusivity cachet and ruining any pretence of preadolescent independence. One day The Spice Girls, the next it's Courtney Love.

Not that such social norms overly worried The Spice Girls as they launched their new album in Andalucia last week in a bash that put the half a million pounds Portishead spent on their album launch in New York in the, quite literally, ha'penny place. The only voices threatening to smash the consensus were those who were wondering aloud whether the Girls are endorsing themselves to death and about to discover what the phrase "diminishing law of return" means. According to Marketing Week magazine (which, unlike Smash Hits or NME, remains the real predictor of pop success), the Girls are doing too much and too often. The magazine gives them only another year of existence.

Apart from major endorsement deals with Walkers Crisps, Asda supermarkets, a range of cosmetics and various smaller side-lines, there is a multi-million deal with Pepsi Cola. It is not just the fact that all of their sponsors resent them being used in other advertising campaigns, it is the nature of the Pepsi Cola deal which is one of the most all-encompassing deals ever signed between a corporation and an entertainment unit. Earlier this year, a Spice Girls single was released which was only available to customers/clients who had collected enough ring pulls from Pepsi Cola cans, and tickets for their first-ever real live gig last week were largely only available to winners of a Pepsi Cola competition - one of the largest competitions ever staged in Europe. The location of the gig was also a Pepsi Cola concern - it took place in Istanbul, for the simple reason that the city lies at the hub of one of the biggest marketing drive areas for Pepsi.

With a Spice Girls film due out in two months' time and their new album Spiceworld out in two weeks it is debatable, according to business and marketing analysts, if further market penetration is possible. Musically there is nothing there at all, but selling 18 million copies of their debut album makes the Girls a major pop phenomenon of our time. It wasn't just the individualising of the five members prompting the consumer-friendly "who's your favourite Spice?" tag-line, it was a number of other factors which mainly centered around their fun-loving, cheeky and fausse feminist personas. As equidistant from Bananarama as they are from Huggy Bear, there is a playful knowingness about them, as if everything they do and say should be put between a giant pair of ironic quotation marks.

Whether it be on a media or a marketing level, they have writ themselves large in the pop consciousness and on other plains too - the Labour Party and The Conservatives got themselves involved in an unseemly "battle of the Spices" at the last British election. Whether they represent the Essex Girls' revenge, a post-feminist throwback, a blip on pop's trajectory course or the ultimate triumph of marketing over both style and content, will unravel itself over the coming months. They're either going to be a footnote or a chapter in the history of pop, and even then that will depend on the title of the book you're reading.