#9555 - Lecture - Children & Youth Markets

• Cognitive development or changes in thinking as we grow up has a lot of growth aka maturation. There is some learning going on and changes depending on how we get new information and incorporate it into the old stuff from preceding weeks and months and even years.

• Socialisation though has a lot to do with learning but not necessarily in school. So it’s within families that we learn a lot of our consumption practices like eating, spending money, and consuming media and get basic beliefs about consumption like being materialistic or frugal.

• Many philosophers and psychologists have tried to analyse mental acts (psychology about the mind) and use a three part structure to do so:

  • Cognitive (thinking)

  • Affective (feeling)

  • Conative (behavior)

• The consumption cycle.

• Instigation:

  • Many adults will run a household and note things that need replenished or that are missing or need renewing. Children can help and remind what they need and often accompany her to the supermarket.

  • Materialism is important. If children and socialised to value and almost worship the goods that define them, they will constantly desire to renew old stuff and their identities will be largely defined by the things they wear, own and show off to others.

  • The frugal person will repair rather than renew and recycle rather than accumulate or dump. Frugality and greenness is often found in early adolescence when idealistic values emerge.

  • “Green” consumers or luxury good consumers have different beliefs which will affect their approach to instigation and the other parts of the cycle.

• Preparation:

  • If teens think it is appropriate to turn the browsing and buying behavior into a social event then they will need to text or maybe use some form of social media to organise their friends into a group.

  • The amount of preparation depends on the good/service required.

  • Holidays are a product that is marketed immediately after Christmas and into New Year which is a good 6 months before families usually go on holiday during the school holidays in summer. Children will want to contribute to the decision making process. Often status and social standing operate here.

• Consummation:

  • The decision making, and the rituals and routines surrounding a purchase choice.

  • This is where marketing is very visible in a high street presence.

  • There is some psychology here to do with why some people get great satisfaction obtaining a bargain whereas others are not that bothered.

  • Financial circumstances have a role to play and if you have a tight budget a bargain is a great find but many wealthy people can also be excited by bargains. Self-gifts mean that you spend to spoil yourself and it could be the start of a path toward dysfunctional or compulsive shopping.

  • The line between goods-in-the-basket/trolley and payment is usually filled with distractors and is designed to get you out as soon as possible. There has been public concern about sweets place at the checkout for kids to pester their parents to buy.

• Exploration:

  • This involves getting home and unpacking the item to evaluate whether the package matches the expectations.

  • Wearing it or using it means that you could see your social status changing a bit and social comparison kicks in. This means you can compare with friends you admire and aspire to be like (upward social comparison) or compare with those who you can now look down on as they don’t have this possession (downward social comparison).

  • Knowing that goods and services have added value because they symbolise wealth and success emerges about 7 years of age and parents of course might encourage this or tell the child that it doesn’t matter, we’re all the same rich and poor and effectively avoid encouraging materialistic values.

• Dissolution or Appreciation:

  • Either the purchase is forgotten about or disposed of (Dissolution) – or else it is kept and assimilated into private world of the child, her bedroom and all the stuff there and might become part of the complex identity of the owner (Possession).

Lecture Two – Children & The Commercial World

• There are different kinds of schemata and many of them are mentally represented using language and others using images.

• The basic principle is that there is just too much information out there coming in through our eyes and ears primarily. We need to store it and use it to anticipate events and one of the jobs we are designed to be good at as we grow up is to make our mental world a stable and predictable one.

• The very young child is driven by the senses and as the schemata in her mind grow and develop her behaviour becomes more and more driven by mental schemata.

• Scripts are general plans of what to do and say i.e. how to perform in certain situations.

• Stereotypes are generalisations we hold about groups of other people. They exist because of information overload – all the information out there in the social world is just too much to attend to in such a short time.

• They are often discussed in the context of prejudice and discrimination because some stereotypes are uniformly negative and members of that group suffer discrimination.

• We respond to stimuli that arrive at our senses. They carry lots of information about our environment and the job of the child is to make sense of this information. When the child is born there are some schemata that are already there.

• From the regularities in our environment we build mental schemata through learning. So by the time the infant becomes an adult much of the behavior is coordinated by the schemata from the mind. We pay attention and can monitor change – when the accustomed predictions don’t happen we go to information out there rapidly to check on what’s going on.

• Social construction means that some cultures at some times in history have produced an idea that many people in the culture thinks is the ‘natural’ way the world is.

• Kids versus children – this contrast reflects two discourses on childhood that will emerge and surround much of the discussions and debates on social issues concerning marketing to children.

Lecture Three – Putting Advertising & Children Together

• Getting the child to pay attention is usually quite difficult. Since they are stimulus driven rather than schema driven (see your Tool Box) they are easily distracted by another stimulus rather than the central brain driven processes taking charge.

• Between about 6 and 8 years of age children begin to realise that advertising is telling them information about the brand. But they do not understand completely that this information is partial – it only gives you the positive things about the brand.

• Children know about showing off and understand impression management at some point after 6 years of age.

• Topic/comment is a basic structure that frames our understanding of discourse.

• So when you encounter an ad – as a mature person who is literate with advertising – you look for the brand as the topic and assume that the rest of what’s there is comment.

• An advertisement is a structured type of communication that has a topic (the brand) and a comment (the rest).

• So we assume that the comment is somehow relevant to the topic. What you see as ‘relevant’ depends on how you understand advertising.

• Adults think that advertising is there to promote and sell stuff so that guides their reading of the ad. If the material is seen as irrelevant to the assumed promotion/selling purpose then the reader will pause and get confused and maybe see irony or just pay more attention (both of these effects may be desired by the advertiser).

• By 7 years and older we have the beginnings of an understanding that people have emotional states, they are autonomous agents, there are social conventions governing behavior and so on. An emerging psychology of the social world around them is emerging and developing and the roots of this arise before 5 years of age with what is often called ‘theory of mind’ but is better described as the origins of the idea of other people with thoughts, intentions, beliefs and all the other mental equipment that makes us human.

• The ideological interpretation where the adolescent is capable of examining advertising in the abstract.

Lecture Four – Basics of Child Development

• These are two very basic functions of language.

• To get something and to change an adult’s behaviour to satisfy one’s own desires is a goal which children...