Marketing to Children

Marketers are aware that children are often the key to their parents money, by constantly nagging it is possible for them to influence their parents decision making. This is called pester power and can influence parents to buy advertised or fashionable items.

Advertisers spend 100s of billions of dollars a year worldwide encouraging, persuading and manipulating people into a consumer lifestyle that has devastating consequences for the environment through its extravagance and wastefulness. Advertising exploits individual insecurities, creates false needs and offers counterfeit solutions. It fosters dissatisfaction that leads to consumption. Children are particularly vulnerable to this sort of manipulation (Beder, 2009).

During the course lecture a interesting TV programme was shown relating children’s attitudes to media and modern advertising. In the title of the programme a key phrase was ‘children grow older younger’ which marketing has realised that children of a very young age are able to recognize the most popular brands such as Coca-Cola, Fish-Fingers, Barbie and did not recognize or show interest in brands they had not tried.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L01zf0aQvxQ

Another subject was about Piaget's theory which is based on the idea that the developing child builds cognitive structures–in other words, mental “maps”, schemes, or networked concepts for understanding and responding to physical experiences within his or her environment.

More about Piaget's Theory you can find on: http://www.funderstanding.com/content/piaget