Understanding Children as Consumers

David Marshall, David Marshall

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781446246412
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

What drives children as consumers? How do advertising campaigns and branding effect children and young people? How do children themselves understand and evaluate these influences?

Whether fashion, toys, food, branding, money - from TV adverts and the supermarket aisle, to the internet and peer trends, there is a growing presence of marketing forces directed at and influencing children and young people. How should these forces be understood, and what means of research or dialogue is required to assess them?

With critical insight, the contributors to this collection, take up the evaluation of the child as an active consumer, and offer a valuable rethinking of the discussions and literature on the subject.

Features:

•14 original chapters from leading researchers in the field

•Each chapter contains vignettes or case examples to reinforce learning

•Contains consideration of future research directions in each of the topics that the chapters cover.

This book will be relevant reading for postgraduates and advanced undergraduates with an interest in children as consumers, consumer behaviour and on marketing courses in general as well as for researchers working in this field.

1	Introduction

David Marshall

The aim of Understanding Children as Consumers is to look at how we view children as consumers and to consider the extent to which they are actively engaged in the marketplace as the buyers, users and recipients of consumer goods. This edited collection draws on recent research and academic expertise within the area of consumer behaviour and childhood consumption. It looks at a range of age groups but is primarily focused on children aged 8 to 12 years old. As a number of commentators have noted, childhood is firmly embedded in the commercial marketplace (Langer, 1994, 2005; Cook, 2004) and a major challenge is to understand the ways in which young consumers negotiate this terrain.

In (re)thinking children as consumers we need to recognize the ubiquity of the marketplace in children’s everyday lives and consider the ways in which they experience this commercial world, be it through exposure to various forms of media, visiting retail stores, making requests for products, or purchasing goods with their own money. With direct and indirect marketing to children on the increase there is a question over how children engage with this commercial world. A number of discussions, for example, around food marketing and childhood obesity, online activity and sedentary lifestyles, or increased materialism among the young tend to place children as hapless victims subject to the onslaught of marketing activity. While we have often excluded children from debates about consumption, manufacturers and retailers have long recognized the role of children as consumers and acknowledged their contribution to family decision making (Kline, 1993; Cross, 1997; Cook, 2004).

With this growth in marketing to children some commentators have gone as far as claiming that children are suffering from ‘marketing related diseases’ and that we are witnessing the ‘hostile takeover of childhood’ in a ‘toxic’ commercial environment permeating all aspects of young lives (Schor, 2006, citing commercialalert.com; see also Linn, 2004; Palmer, 2007). Seen from this perspective, this once commercial-free arena of childhood is increasingly populated with attempts to ‘lure’ young consumers, and their parents, into ever more consumption, with a variety of devious tactics that include recruiting children to promote products in the playground and online through social networking sites, as well as by using a variety of promotional tactics that ‘play on their dreams and exploit their vulnerabilities’ (Mayo and Nairn, 2009: xvii). Underpinning this moralizing is an assumption about children as ‘consumers’ and a question over the extent to which they are either vulnerable and exploited in the commercial environment to which they are exposed or competent and savvied individuals. As Cook (2004: 7) notes, ‘The dichotomous construction of the exploited child and the empowered child arises from a lingering tension between markets and moral sentiment: it is a tension which, at least since the beginning of industrialisation, continues to inform considerations of childhood’. Resolution of this tension, according to Cook, occurs where goods are considered beneficial and functional, as is the case with educational goods, or when children are seen as full persons who desire goods and can exhibit some degree of agency. Gunter and Furnham (1998: 7) argue that children resemble other (adult) consumers in many ways and exhibit a degree of sophistication and pragmatism in their approach to the marketplace to the extent that they are both ‘active and discerning’ in their consumption. Similar views are expressed by David Buckingham (2000, 2008; Buckingham and Willett, 2006) in his accounts of children and media. One only needs to consider their knowledge about latest toys, or the hottest characters on collectible cards, the ‘best’ sports players, or the coolest websites.

These issues form the basis of what this book is trying to do in looking critically at children¹ as active consumers, but it differs from previous accounts by trying to address the key issues and uncover what being a consumer means to children themselves – namely, from their perspective!² This attempt to give children some voice in the debate is sympathetic to the idea that they should have some say, that their opinions matter, and that they have some ‘agency’ as consumers and ‘social beings’ in their own right (James et al., 1998).³

Marketing to children

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To put this idea of vulnerable or competent consumers into context let us consider where much of the discussion about children as consumers has been centred thus far – on marketing to children. One of the most influential writers in the field remains James McNeal. His books include Children as Consumers: Insights and Implications (1987) and The Kid’s Market Myths and Realities (1999) in which he offers interesting insights into young consumers. These, along with texts like Guber and Berry’s Marketing to and through Kids (1993), raised the profile of the children’s market and generated interest in the notion of children as consumers. Much of their focus was on how to market to children as opposed to what children are doing with marketing.

Later texts such as Acuff’s (1997) What Kids Buy and Why: The Psychology of Marketing to Kids, or Del Vecchio’s (1997) Creating Ever Cool: A Marketeer’s Guide to a Kid’s Heart attempted to unpack the key to successful marketing. Cross offers an historical account of childs’ play in Kid’s Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (1997) and The Cute and the Cool: Wonderous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (2004) where he looks at changes in the children’s market in the USA. Cook’s historical account of the commercialization of children’s fashion with The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer (2004) shows that the idea of marketing to young consumers is not some new phenomenon but part of a gradual process of integrating children into the marketplace. Gunter and Furnham provide an excellent psychological analysis of the young consumer entitled Children as Consumers (1998) in which they detail the nature of the children’s market and their role as consumers. McNeal’s Kids as Customers: A Handbook of Marketing to Children (1992) and more recently On Becoming a Consumer: The Development of Consumer Behavior Patterns in Childhood (2007) look at how children develop as consumers. Ellen Seiter’s (1993) treatise on the children’s toy market, Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture, focuses on children’s creative use of consumer goods and media. David Buckingham in After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media (2000) looks at children and the media environment at the start of the century, a theme developed with Rebekah Willett in their (2006) edited text Digital Generations. In contrast to this academic approach, Martin Lindstrom and Patricia Seybold (2003) offer a practitioner’s perspective on global kids in Brand Child looking at contemporary market research with young consumers.

But as an interest in marketing to children grew so too did concerns over the way in which this was developing. Stephen Kline’s excellent history of marketing to children, Out of the Garden (1993), maps out a detailed historical trajectory of children’s play culture and the role of the mass media in building up the ‘children’s’ market. His account ten years later of the development of new media in Digital Play (Kline et al., 2003) reveals the emerging relationship between technology, culture and marketing in the games and video industry. Susan Linn’s (2004) Consuming Kids and Juliet Schor’s (2004) Born to Buy both raised important questions over this increasingly commercialized world of childhood and the pervasive nature of marketing. More recently the UK National Consumer Council’s (Nairn et al., 2007) study on materialism and marketing towards children concluded that children who spend more time in front of the television or computer tend to be more materialistic and have lower self-esteem, raising further concerns over the impact of marketing to younger consumers. Mayo and Nairn’s (2009) Consumer Kids: How Big Business is Grooming our Children for Profit leaves little doubt as to the sentiment of the text. They provide an insightful account of the latest marketing tactics and the impact on children’s wellbeing⁴ in an increasingly commercial world and also look at some of the positive ways in which children are responding to this consumer world.

A large part of the debate on marketing to children has focused on advertising, primarily in relation to mass media advertising and the ways in which children engage with television and, more recently, online advertising. Research from over thirty years ago showed that children’s ability to distinguish between persuasive advertising and television programmes was related to age (Robertson and Rossiter, 1974). While some would argue that children lack the life skills and experience to resist the persuasive nature of commercial advertising others claim that promotional messages provide information to allow for informed choice (Moore, 2004). Inherent in this debate is the idea that advertising to children is ‘unfair’ and one approach has been to look for a ‘magic age’ at which children can understand the persuasive intent of these commercial messages. While it has commonly been assumed that teenagers are less vulnerable to advertising, recent research suggests that they may be just as persuadable as younger children when it comes to digital marketing. The persuasion model relies on explicit mental processes and does not account for the formation of implicit attitudes when children encounter certain stimuli (Livingstone and Helsper, 2006; Nairn and Fine, 2008). Today’s children are faced with a variety of new media where the distinctions between commercial and non-commercial material are increasingly blurred, for example, when advergames promote brands online (Moore and Rideout, 2007; Lee et al., 2009). For this generation, television advertising represents only one aspect of their consumption experience and more recent accounts have considered their engagement with a broader range of media including the internet (Livingstone and Helsper, 2004; Tufte et al., 2005; Schor, 2006; Ekström and Tufte, 2007; Livingstone, 2009).

As we ponder on the impact of advertising campaigns on children, few ask if younger children are actually interested in these ever more devious advertising campaigns or how they relate to them, and most importantly how they impact on their behaviour (Andersen, 2007). While most of the discussion around marketing to children has centred on exposure and the comprehension of commercial intent, we know much less about how children utilize that information and the impact on their behaviour (Lawlor and Prothero, 2002; Bartholomew and O’Donohoe, 2003). In a rapidly changing media environment we might also ask how children have learnt to deal with marketing as a consequence of this increased exposure to products and brands and try to understand that experience from their perspective.

Children and consumption

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Over a twenty year period from the 1960s to the end of the 1980s, young consumer spending in the USA increased from $2bn to $6bn and their influence extended to a staggering $132bn of household expenditure (McNeal, 1992). This trend was to continue through the 1980s in the United States with an increasingly affluent teenage market, despite numbers of teenagers declining by 15.5 per cent (Gunter and Furnham 1998: 2; see also Davis, 1990; McNeal, 1992). By the end of the 1990s it was estimated that children in the USA accounted for $23bn in direct spending, almost all of this discretionary, and influenced a further $188bn in family purchases (McNeal, 1999). Ten years on the children’s market (i.e. the annualized amount spent on child related goods and activities) is around $921bn⁵ in the United States. The corresponding value of the UK market is around £117 bn.⁶

The most recent account of children’s direct purchasing power in the USA is around $51.8bn (Schor, 2006). It is difficult to get similar figures for the UK but the most recent British pocket money survey from the Halifax⁷ showed the following:

• Average pocket money in 2008 was £6.13 per week, versus £8.01 in 2007.
• Younger children aged between 8 and 11 years old got almost half the amount of their older counterparts (12 to 15 years old) receiving £4.34.
• Pocket money was out of step with inflation – there was a shortfall of £3.30 for 2008 s weekly allowance compared with three years beforehand.
• Whilst parents provided a weekly allowance they continued to pay for mobiles, iPods and gifts.
• Three in ten children saved some of their pocket money each week; however, if they wanted something in addition to their allowance they tended to ask for it as a ‘present’ (Halifax, 2008).

With an estimated 13 million children aged under sixteen in the UK (Office for National Statistics, 2009), and around 70 per cent receiving pocket money, this represents considerable spending power that does not include money gifted to children or the cash they earn for part-time jobs or individual enterprise. The ChildWise Monitor Report⁸ (2009) found 84 per cent of UK children aged 5 to 16 years old received a regular income, with 72 per cent receiving pocket money or an allowance and a quarter earning income from a paid job. Average weekly income was £10.10, with children aged 5 to 10 years old getting around £4.70 per week on average and 11 to 16 year olds receiving £12.10 each. This gives a total value of children’s annual income of £3800m,⁹ with a further estimated £5100m in ad hoc handouts including birthday money. Taken together this represents a combined annual figure of £8900m per year (covering pocket money, allowances, paid jobs and ad hoc handouts) at children’s disposal.

James McNeal (1987, 1992, 1999) discusses this potentially lucrative market of young consumers spending their money on a range of items such as confectionary, drinks, toys, fast food, magazines, movies and music and influencing family spending¹⁰ (directly and indirectly) on products as diverse as breakfast cereals, family cars and holidays. The (2008) ChildWise Report gave an average annual self spend for the UK’s 5 to 16 year olds of £310m on crisps and snacks, £290m on soft drinks, £260m on sweets and chocolate, £1090m on clothing, £440m on music and CDs, and £340m on computer software – a grand total across these categories of £2730m. In a number of these areas children are seen as having their own ‘needs’ and also a willingness to spend money on such products, but to constitute a market they also need to have the ability and the authority to purchase, as well as some knowledge and understanding of that market.

This idea of a ‘children’s market’ is a relatively new development in ‘western’ markets and up to the 1960s children were not seen as customers in their own right but as savers and future customers. While most of the focus has been on children’s direct and indirect influence on family purchases, from breakfast cereals through to cars, an increasing number of products and promotions are being targeted directly at children. This has led to debates around pester power and persuasive kids, raising concerns over the ways in which this commercialization of childhood is impacting on family life (Wooton, 2003; Carauna and Vasello, 2004; Preston, 2004; Spungin, 2004). However, more recent views suggest that parent–child relationships are less confrontational and more collaborative in contemporary western societies. Finally, children are important as a future market for most goods and services and one to be cultivate...