Children as a Primary Market
To begin with, children are—like adults—a primary market, a more or less distinct customer group interested in and able to afford specific products. More than ever before, children have ample discretionary money available to them. For example, more than 60 percent of American youth receive an allowance (typically beginning at eight years of age), and the amount of their allowances increases through primary school and high school.1 Although specific amounts vary significantly across countries, nearly half of all children receive money for making good grades in school or for doing household chores (for example, walking the dog or washing the family car). By adolescence, this money is often coupled with earnings from small jobs such as babysitting or lawn care. For example, American children and teens receive on average about eight hundred dollars a year for allowance (excluding money from outside employment). With more than forty million youth between the ages of eight and eighteen in the United States, we are talking about more than thirty billion discretionary dollars annually—a serious primary market indeed.
How do children develop into full-fledged consumers? To answer this question, it is most useful to turn to theories of consumer socialization, the spontaneous process in which children develop the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that they need in order to operate as consumers. Although there is no generally accepted definition of consumer behavior, many definitions share four components. A consumer is capable of taking action to fulfill his or her needs and preferences; choosing and purchasing a product; evaluating a purchase and comparing it with alternatives; and understanding the social and cultural significance of the product.
Taking Action to Fulfill Needs and Preferences
To qualify as a primary market, children need to be able to express needs and take action to fulfill them. Children are born with particular needs and preferences for tastes, colors, and sounds. Initially, they mainly express these needs and preferences reactively, by indicating whether they like or dislike a certain product. By the time they reach about two years of age, children become more active in expressing their needs and preferences. They begin to request products that they come across in their environment—and pester their parents to buy them. Moreover, as many parents can attest, this pestering sometimes takes the form of “store wars,” in which parents and children have heated battles regarding which objects will (and will not) be placed in the store shopping cart.
These store battles tend to increase until children are six years of age, after which they typically decline. Developmentally, this curvilinear pattern (increase followed by decrease) of parent-child disputes is plausible. Children are able to ward off temptation and delay gratification only after they reach five or six years of age. Before then, such abilities are much more limited or nonexistent. As the now-classic “marshmallow experiment” (see chapter 11) has repeatedly shown, when younger children see something tasty, they are usually powerless to resist it. Parents can draw toddlers’ and preschoolers’ attention away from enticing products by giving them a toy to play with, but it is only when children have learned effective strategies of their own (around five or six years old) that they are able to resist temptation and delay gratification.2
In addition to their improved ability to delay gratification, children’s persuasive strategies for getting what they want from their parents typically become more sophisticated as they get older. Whereas younger children often use coercive strategies to convince their parents (nagging, tantrums, etc.), by about age five, children increasingly use more advanced persuasive strategies, such as arguing, bargaining, buttering up, eliciting pity, and even telling lies (“But Mom, all the kids in my class are allowed to eat chips!”). These more sophisticated persuasive attempts result in fewer parent-child disagreements than occur with younger children. And it should be no surprise that older children (nine to twelve years old) are twice as successful at persuading their parents to buy a particular product in the supermarket as younger children (three to five years).3
Choosing and Purchasing a Product
Around age five, children start to buy things on their own, which is a second important prerequisite for a member of a primary market. Initially, parents supervise the process of selecting and paying for an item in a store. Research suggests that nearly 75 percent of five-year-olds purchase something in the presence of their parents. By the time children are eight, most have made a purchase with their parents there.4 At that age, according to James McNeal, approximately half of children make more or less regular trips to the store to buy something on their own. They usually go to a nearby store or supermarket to which they can walk safely.5 And by the time they are teenagers, nearly 70 percent use a savings account, checking account, debit card, or credit card.6
Evaluating and Comparing Purchases
In addition to expressing preferences and being able to select and make purchases, a third prerequisite of becoming a full-fledged consumer involves knowing how to evaluate products and compare alternatives. To do this, one must have the critical ability to assess a product’s suitability and quality. Young children (toddlers, preschoolers, young primary school children) do not have this ability. As discussed in chapters 4 and 5, they often center their attention on one or two details of a product. As a result, they typically have trouble taking in multiple product details at once, a skill necessary for proper evaluation. By around age eight, however, children start to scrutinize every product that attracts their attention, down to the last detail, and to compare it with other products.
As discussed in chapter 5, this process of decentration results in critical evaluations of media content—critiquing it for poor acting, lack of humor, and other undesirable characteristics. Advertisements are not exempt from children’s critical gaze. Unlike younger children, who see commercials mainly as appealing entertainment, children from about the age of eight can be extremely skeptical of commercials. In this period, they begin developing the ability to grasp multiple perspectives, and with this understanding, they begin to comprehend that advertising is meant to persuade them to buy a certain brand, a realization that may further increase their skepticism.7
Understanding the Social Significance of Consumer Behavior
Finally, the ability to function as a full-fledged consumer requires an understanding of the social and cultural aspects of consumer behavior. This understanding, which coincides with adolescence, involves the ability to frame products or brands within the social, cultural, and economic contexts of specific individuals and groups. Hip-hop fans and emo enthusiasts wear clothing from different brands, and goths look decidedly different from hipsters. Adolescents develop the skills to assess products and brands within the social context of their cliques or subcultures. They learn their groups’ norms, and the ways they differ from the norms of other groups and subcultures. They learn that certain subcultural differences are associated with differences in social, cultural, and economic status. They express their identity in large part through what they consume. Through the clothes they wear, the music they listen to, the movies they see, and their activity on social media, they show who they are and are not, what they find important, and how they want others to view them. This final developmental prerequisite of consumer behavior occurs in a period that has been named the reflective stage.8
Children as Influencers
Children are attractive as consumers not only because they form an important primary market but also because they have a sizable influence on family purchases. Besides influencing what groceries end up in the family home, they influence the family’s choice of restaurants, vacation destination, and even the model of the new family car. This increasing influence of youth on family purchases began in the 1970s, and has since increased quite steadily.9 One of the main reasons for this shift, scholars believe, is that families have moved from an authoritarian style to a more authoritative parenting style. Until the 1960s, the most common parenting style was authoritarian, in which parents deman
ded obedience and respect from their children. When parents spoke, for example, children were expected to be quiet and listen. In today’s families, parents value their children’s input and encourage them to speak up. Understanding, equality, and compromise are now paramount. Modern families have fewer fixed rules. Family members negotiate family decisions and act in accordance with the outcome.
Children influence their parents’ purchases both directly and indirectly. Direct influence occurs when they ask for or demand a product, hint that they want something, or make a recommendation. And these direct requests happen often, particularly among young children. For example, research in the United States showed that when at the grocery store with their parents, four- to six-year-olds request a certain product every two and a half minutes.10 Similarly, work in the Netherlands found that children between three and five years old request a product, on average, once every four minutes.11 These direct requests are relatively successful. Studies have shown that with very young children (around age two), parents acquiesce about 14 percent of the time. By the time their children are about five years of age, this number increases to roughly 50 percent—and estimates are even higher if “postponed concessions” are included; after all, parents do not always give in to their children immediately, but may do so after a period of time has passed.12
The number of product demands declines once children reach the age of seven. This does not mean that they have less influence on family purchases. On the contrary, numerous studies show that children have more influence on family purchases as they get older.13 One explanation for this seeming paradox is that older children are more likely than younger children to influence their parents indirectly. Indirect influence occurs when parents account for their child’s wishes and preferences when making purchases for the child. Many parents buy their children’s favorite brands, without prompting, when shopping because they know precisely which brands their children prefer and want to do something nice for them.14
Children as Future Customers
Finally, children also represent a third important market—they are the adult customers of the future. Research shows that adults tend to remain loyal to many brands that they favored as children. Manufacturers that manage to capture a young child’s attention have a very good chance of gaining his or her enduring loyalty as a consumer. Thus, fostering customer loyalty via brand preference at an early age is a key aim for marketers. Through experience with products, such as shopping with parents, children learn about brands and improve their brand awareness, for example, their recognition and recall of brand names. But for marketers, brand awareness is only half the battle—they ultimately aim for brand preference and customer loyalty.
Brand preference seems to develop very early in life. In fact, research has shown that approximately two-thirds of children between three and six years old “often” or “almost always” ask their parents for specific brands.15 For example, starting around two years of age, children tend to prefer peanut butter featured in frequent commercials over the same peanut butter packaged as an unknown brand. They also think the branded peanut butter tastes much better than the same peanut butter without the label.16
These findings, and others like them, indicate that children start developing brand preferences at a very young age. What is unclear, however, is the extent to which their preferences remain stable as they get older. There have been only a few studies on brand loyalty among children, and their results are inconsistent. Some authors say that children’s preferences change significantly during childhood but stabilize in adolescence. One study, for example, found that more than half of thirty-year-olds still purchased the brands that they used when they were sixteen.17 Another study showed, however, that brand loyalty applied only in the case of certain products and brands. For example, preferences for some products (such as soft drinks) and brands are formed during childhood and are rather stable, but preferences for products and brands that develop only during or after adolescence are less stable than advertisers might wish.18 Adolescents seem to be most loyal to “intimate” products, such as deodorant, shampoo, and contact lens solution, whereas products and brands they use to express their identity in their clique or subculture, such as fashion labels, are less likely to induce feelings of loyalty.19
The Changing Commercial Environment
In the past, advertisers relied largely on intuition when designing marketing campaigns for children. But as the focus on youth as budding consumers has increased, the marketing world has come to depend heavily on market research. This research has led to a world in which youth are surrounded by marketing efforts. They come across these marketing efforts while watching their favorite television shows, perusing their favorite magazines, and listening to their favorite bands on Spotify. Youth now find commercial content appearing within their favorite programs (product placement), on their sports uniforms (brand sponsorship), and online in the form of viral video clips, advergames, banners, and more. And at an ever-increasing rate, advertisers are beginning to embrace cross-platform marketing—using a combination of different platforms—to reach youth.
A striking example of this integrated marketing is the international “AHH Effect” campaign that Coca-Cola launched in 2013. As the name suggests, the purpose of the campaign was to intensify the “AHH effect” in teens when they pop open a can of Coca-Cola. In addition to television commercials, the campaign included dozens of sites with URLs that differed only by the number of Hs they contained. According to the Coca-Cola Company, the campaign provided adolescents a large variety of “snackable” digital content, such as quick YouTube videos and online casual games. It also relied on cross-promotions (promotional tie-ins involving two or more companies) starring famous teen idols, and used social media to encourage adolescents to design their own digital content.20
With such a flooded commercialized environment, it is reasonable to ask how these efforts might be influencing young people. Does watching an average of twenty-eight television commercials an hour (an estimate found in Europe, the United States, and China) influence youth? And if so, how?21 Put another way, how are the more than twenty-five thousand ads that youth see each year influencing them?22 In what follows, we evaluate the effect of advertising on youth, discussing not only how advertising may affect this audience, but also the role of development in this process.
Advertising Effects
Advertising agencies ask themselves daily which commercials are most effective for which products and in which medium. Although these agencies have undoubtedly gathered valuable information about the effects of advertising, such findings are not typically publicly available, because of their competitive information. As a result, published research on the effects of advertising usually involves academic studies.
Academic research on the effects of advertising has a broader aim than commercial research because it seeks to investigate whether and to what extent advertising is harmful to children and teens. Such research generally distinguishes between two broad types of advertising effects: intended and unintended. Intended advertising effects are the effects that advertisers try to achieve, for example, to increase youth’s brand awareness, to influence their brand preferences, or their purchase intentions. The unintended effects of advertising include undesirable side effects. Researchers investigating unintended effects focus on questions such as whether advertising makes children more materialistic, whether it leads to parent-child conflict, or whether it encourages unhealthy eating habits. Academic research investigating advertising effects has typically looked at the effects of television advertising, although more recent work has begun to address newer advertising formats such as those found in video games and online.23
Intended Advertising Effects
To date, nearly one hundred academic studies have been published concerning the intended effects of advertising on youth. These studies generally focus on brand awareness, brand attitude and preferences, and children’s purchase intentions.
Brand Awareness
Children start to become brand aware at a very young age. Marketers know that children as young as two connect the brands they see in advertising with brands they see in stores.24 But is it truly advertising that explains this brand awareness? Are children who watch more commercials, for example, more brand aware than other children? Researchers have explored this question through both correlational and experimental studies, defining brand awareness as both brand recognition and brand recall.
Overall, the existing academic work shows that increased advertising exposure is responsible for increased brand recognition. In correlational studies, researchers typically establish how much television children watch and how many brands children can correctly identify when they are presented with a brand logo, brand character, or packaging. All of these correlational studies have shown that children who consume more television recognize more brand logos and brand characters than do other children.25 Similarly, work with teens has shown that advergames (i.e., games especially designed to promote a specific product) increase brand recognition—particularly among those youth who find the game appealing.26
Experimental studies on brand recognition point to similar results. Carole Macklin, for example, had four- and five-year-olds watch three commercials, one for candy, one for breakfast cereal, and one for chewing gum. After watching just one commercial, 61 percent of the four-year-olds and 65 percent of the five-year-olds recognized the breakfast cereal brand.27 In another study, nine- and ten-year-old girls watched commercials for two diet soft drink brands and two lipstick brands. It took only a single viewing of the commercials for the diet soft drink to increase the subjects’ brand recognition from 28 percent to 88 percent.28 The pre- and post-viewing difference for the lipstick commercial was insignificant, but that was due to a ceiling effect: all the girls had already scored 100 percent on brand recognition, whether or not they had just watched the commercial.
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