Notesale: Turn your study into money

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St Edmund Hall
How do children develop as consumers? What responsibilities do you think
marketers have in relation to the socialization of children as consumers?
According to Nicholls and Cullen (2004), in 2000 the total value of the children’s
market was $396 billion, a rise of 17
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In the US it is estimated that
children also influenced $500 billion of family purchases, such as cars, holidays and
even houses (Campbell and Davis-Packard, 2000), and as such, children are of huge
interest to marketers
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The ethical responsibilities of marketers have long been
a topic of hot debate, as while some view exposure to advertising as necessary to
socialization, others believe children below a certain age are unable to distinguish
between television advertising and entertainment, and are vulnerable to improper
manipulation by marketers
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A less obvious responsibility
than the former, and one that in the US has shown to be commonly overlooked
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Belk (1988) states that individuals
use products to create and communicate their self-concepts, and this is furthered by
Chaplin and John (2005) who name the relationships that form between brands and
self-concepts as ‘self-brand connections’
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Sometimes this can be done through imagining the prototypical users of
certain brands, from which consumers select those who maximize similarity to their
actual or desired self (Escalas and Bettman, 2003)
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However children are engaged in a process of developing their selfconcepts as they grow older, and their relationship with brands changes with this as
they understand how brand cues might be used to form impressions of other people
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Younger children typically represent themselves in fairly concrete
terms, stating facts such as their gender as defining features, and their self-brand
connections are characterized by concrete and surface level associations
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Compared to the
older groups (12-13, 16-18), the 8-9 year olds who were asked to explain why they
had picked certain brands as being relevant to the question ‘who am I?’ largely said
that they had chosen the brand because they owned goods from there, rather than any
kind of conceptual reasoning
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However as children grow older they begin to represent themselves in less concrete
and more abstract terms
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The associations linked with brands also become more abstract,
as personality traits are tied in and user stereotypes are considered
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A trigger for this change is the crash in self-esteem that appears to occur
in children aged around 12-13 (Shim et al, 2011), as goods can be used as a bolster
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Shim et al found
that adolescents shop with peers who bear a close resemblance to themselves, and
peer influence contributes to the way they evaluate products
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Wooten found in
2006 that peers use ridicule to ostracise, haze or admonish peers who violate
consumption norms within a group, hence it is unsurprising that being aware of
brands and what they represent becomes increasingly important to children as they
grow older, and particularly as they reach adolescence
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As consumption and trend-following can be so damaging, then, do marketers have a
moral responsibility to not exploit such needs to conform as seen in children? This is
a key debate seen in the literature, as the ethical argument suggests that children
below 8 cannot always distinguish between television advertising and entertainment,
and are vulnerable to improper manipulation by marketers
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This suggests that children believe as much about the brand from watching the
advert as they do from actually using the product, implying that they believe the
advert to be true
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Even though older children
understood that advertisers employ creative license in presenting the positive aspects
of their products, they did not believe it was the marketer’s responsibility to fairly
portray product performance
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The rise of advergames – ‘online
games designed for the specific purpose of marketing a single brand or product’
(Winkler and Buckler, 2006) – has been particularly concerning
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This
translates into children’s food requests – Mallinckrodt and Mizerski (2007) looked at
branded cereal advergames, and found that while children perceived frees fruit as
being healthier than the advertised cereal, they still planned to request the cereal after
playing the advergame
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On the other hand, the argument is that advertising is a key part of consumer
socialization, defined as ‘the process by which young people acquire skills,
knowledge and attitudes relevant to their effective functioning as consumers in the
marketplace’ (Ward, 1974)
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In this case, rather than the
advertisers or retailers, the responsibility for avoiding this becoming a confrontational
situation lies in good, responsible parenting
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Acuff wrote in 1997 that children should
have access to empowering goods that contribute to self-development, but not to
disempowering or harmful goods, and I think for me this is where the distinction lies
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18
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It appears that children are
overlooked, and parents or other adults continue to be seen as more important in terms
of purchases
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This is
particularly true given the rise of online shopping driven by the ‘digital natives’,
adolescents are increasing their peer communication about consumer choices and
behaviours, and with that their role as consumers is gaining momentum
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In conclusion, I think children develop as consumers in how they view themselves as
people, and how brands/products fit in with this image
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In
some ways I think marketers could be seen to have little responsibility over
socialization, as it is important that children grow into ad-aware consumers
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It may seem extreme, but if regulation is needed to control this, I think those are
the steps we should take as a society, in order to protect the population of the future
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and John, D
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& Agante, L
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S
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J
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J
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(2004) ‘The child-parent purchase relationship:
‘pester power’, human rights and retail ethics’, Journal of Retailing and
Consumer Services, 11(2), 75-86

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Shim, S
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& Barber, B
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(2011) ‘A consumer way of thinking:
linking consumer socialization and consumption motivation perspectives to
adolescent development

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