Children As Consumers Notes

Children as consumers

• Shim et al – Gen Y have powerful economic clout and access to the market via the internet.

• Purchasing power of $600m, total value of children’s market in 2000 of $396bn.

• Represent 3 markets: primary spending, influence on parents, future adult market.

How do children develop as consumers?

• Learn what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ through socialization:

  • Moschis and Churchill – consumers’ mental and behavioura outcomes are a result of socialization processes including modeling the behaviour of others, explicit instruction regarding behavioural expectations, and day to day interactions between socialization agents and learners.

  • Shim et al – parents start as most important agents, children observe and model parents and learn to behave in different contexts, and acquire product preferences and concerns about quality/price/value.

  • As get older peers become more influential, esp with the rise of online shopping – conversations about shopping strengthen the social motivation to consume and reinforce materialistic values. And SNS – photos etc online.

  • Price to getting it ‘wrong’ – Wooten – peers use ridicule against those who violate consumption norms.

  • Consumption develops the sense of self – adolescent stage of life where identity development/conformity to peer expectation becomes salient – view brands as symbolizing references group affiliation, connecting self concepts, having personalities and characteristics.

    • Belk – individuals use products to create and communicate their self concept, use of brands as brand reflect an image. People go through a matching process to identify products and brand that are congruent with self images – Escalas and Bettman – people imagine prototypical users of brands and select those with a similarity to their actual/desired self.

    • The relationship between brands and the self are self-brand connections.

    • Chaplin and John: as children grow older they represent the self in less concrete and more abstract terms, becomes more complex, greater variety of self constructs. Understanding of brands also becomes more abstract, assign personality traits, see how brand cues are used in impression formation.

    • Number of self brand connections increases with age – when young they make surface level associations based on familiarity and ownership, by adolescence characterized by abstract/symbolic associations like personality traits, user stereotypes, reference group membership. More vigilant about the social implications of brand ownership. Who am I? collage experiment – younger group (8-9) picked the brands they owned rather than any conceptual reasoning.

  • Negative effect on low...

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