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Consumer Socialisation

Socialisation has a long history in sociology and social psychology and refers to how people acquire the knowledge, skills and disposition to become capable members of society. This is something that happens throughout our lives as we learn what is expected in terms of our mental actions that drive our behavior. Consumer socialisation is an extension of this and has been defined by Ward (1974) as “the process by which young people acquire skills, knowledge and attitudes relevant to their function as consumers in the marketplace”. John (2008) proposes that “consumer socialisation be viewed as a developmental process occurring in a series of stages as children become socialised in their roles as consumers”. There is an implicit assumption that we all progress inevitably to an adult state of being mature participants in the consumption practices of our society; however, it must be kept in mind that society is full of different disparate groups who consume in different ways.

Research surrounding the consumer behavior of children began in the 1950’s and an impressive body of research now exists covering a range of related topics, one of which being the stages of consumer socilisation (John, 1999). However, this cannot be considered in isolation from the stages of cognitive and social development which underpins the stages of consumer socialisation. A number of theorists have developed stage models to explain the changes in cognitive and social development including Piaget’s (1936) stages of cognitive development, Selman’s (1980) stages of social perspective taking, Barenboim’s (1981) stages of impression formation and John’s (1999) stages of information processing.

Piaget’s (1936) theory is regularly used as a basis to understand the developments in children’s consumer socialisation. This theory postulates that cognitive development is comprised of four main stages; sensorimotor (0-2 years), preoperational (2-7 years), concrete operational (7-11 years), formal operational (11+ years). A variety of cognitive differences exist between these stages but primarily children in the preoperational stage are perceptually bound to observable aspects of the environment, are characterised by centration and are egocentric. In contrast children in the concrete operational stage have developed the ability to think more deeply about the stimuli in their environment, can consider multiple dimensions at once and are able to consider that others have differing perspectives to their own. By the time a child reaches the formal operational stage they have started to think more like an adult and have more complex thought processes, including the ability to think in a more abstract and hypothetical way.

These developments have been evaluated to form the three stages of consumer socialisations which consider the implications of the changes in cognitive developments in relation to consumer activity; the perceptual stage (3-7 years), the analytical stage (7-11 years) and the reflective stage (11+ years). In the perceptual stage, consumer knowledge is based on perceptual features alone and distinctions are made on single dimensions. As younger children in this stage struggle to consider more than one dimension Kunkel (1988) suggests that they will view television as a “monolithic entity” and will be unable to distinguish advertisements from television programs. By the child reaches age 5, they can generally distinguish between advertisements and television programmes, however children’s egocentrism in the perceptual period means they are unable to understand the persuasive nature of advertising. Children at this stage interpret the advertisement as providing factual information and their egocentric outlook prevents them from understanding that the advert can be interpreted as a persuasive message. A study by Gaines and Esserman (1981) showed that only 1% of 4-5 years olds understood that the “goal of an advertisement was to try and make you buy things” (Pine and Nash, 2002) and this only rose to 28% in 6-8 year olds. This argument is used regularly by proponents of an advertising ban to children as they “lack the cognitive skills to defend themselves against attractive and cleverly produced advertising messages” (Valkenburg, 2000) which makes them particularly vulnerable, and susceptible to manipulation by advertising.This egocentric perspective and centration limits the child in terms of another aspect of consumption: purchase influence and negotiation. When children see a desirable item they center their attention on it and have difficulty resisting (Ebbeson, 1970), purchase influence is then exerted by means of grabbing and screaming. The fact that children in this stage also expect reality to match perception, can lead to dissatisfaction. As adults we appreciate that marketers exaggerate and show products in the best possible lights and build this into our expectations of the product. However, young children are perceptually bound and so do not understand that products will often not match up to the gloss and glamour of how they were portrayed. Children are exposed to the world of commerce from a young age and are immersed in the shopping process as they regularly accompany their parents to the shops. It is through these observations that they can develop a basic understanding of the shopping process and the exchange of money for goods and services. Part of the consumer socialisation process includes the acquisition of scripts which are the rules and regulations of a culture that are picked up rather than specifically taught. Children pick up a shopping script through observation and, for example, learn that you have to pay for items rather than just take them. The limitation in this stage of only being able to consider a single dimension means that when making decisions about purchases, children differentiate on the basis or one perceptual feature, for example shape or colour, this has...

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