Marketing Tricks
Marketers want to hook children on shopping. Kids as young as 18 months recognize product logos. That fact isn't lost on advertisers, who spend $15 billion a year pushing products and services aimed at children. Kids now watch an average of 40,000 TV commercials a year, and even McDonald's and PBS collaborate on brand promotion.(7) In order to lift the siege, Susan Linn, a Harvard graduate, medical school instructor of psychiatry and a writer considered one of the country's leading experts on how marketing and television exposure affect children, describes five ways to protect children against aggressive marketing campaigns. in her article Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood.(8) Being an advocate for children, but knowing that the message comes through the adults in that child's life, she writes to both audiences and gives tips to prevent these uninvited marketers from coming into our homes — not through the front door but through our televisions and computers.
The number one way Linn advises parents and children to stop the siege is to simply turn off the television. On average, kids watch four hours of TV daily, with about 15 minutes an hour dedicated to commercials. They are the targeted audience at a certain time of the day when their watching habits have been minutely researched by marketing companies. The second way is to explain "the game." By "the game" Linn means teaching children the ability to distinguish programming from advertising. Help children build a healthy skepticism by talking with them about ads or marketing tricks. Remind them to always question every marketing message, not just on the television but on the other types of media that are now available to them and that surround them constantly. Depending on one's demographics the third step is to limit visits to the malls. Bright colors and store displays at kids' height are designed to incite nagging and impulse buying. If you have to shop with your kids, discuss in advance what you'll buy and stick to it. The fourth bit of advice is to always be a role model for children. "Parents need to look at their own consumption," says Linn, "because children learn through models." If you place a premium on having the latest styles, the largest house or the fanciest car, children will likely share the same values." The fifth and final strategy is to have discussions with children about something that they are likely to do which is "buy to buy", meaning that when they have money in their pocket, it usually feels as if it is literally burning a hole in it.
Talking and providing other opportunities for them to use their money in different ways is a powerful counter-message for young consumers. My students walk in each morning with little black bags full of chips and candy. Having taught this population for many years and being familiar with their demographics, I know that they are going to a store located across the street from the projects in which they live and making these types of purchases. Discussing and revisiting Linn's five strategies and tips throughout this unit will allow both us (students and teacher) opportunities to speak to the issue of what, when, and why they make the purchases that they chose to make and if they truly need what they want.
Because second-grade children are often unable to employ such judgment, they are more vulnerable to marketing. Preschool children, for instance, have trouble differentiating between commercials and regular programming on television. Slightly older children can make the distinction, but they are concrete thinkers, tending to believe what they see in a fifteen-second commercial for cookies or a toy. Until the age of about eight, children can't really understand the concept of persuasive intent—that every aspect of an ad is selected to make a product appealing and to convince people to buy it. Older kids and teens might be more cynical about advertising, but their skepticism doesn't seem to affect their tendency to want or buy the products they see so glowingly portrayed all around them. Linn attacks these issues head on and brings to the fore front the issue of targeting young consumers.(9) She has been sufficiently successful that marketers to children have made changes but the change has to start with educating the young consumers. Again, the ultimate goal of this unit is for children to understand marketing tricks, understand that they are the main target of those tricks or "games" and empower them with this knowledge so that when they enter into the big world of consumerism, they are better prepared to make wise, consumer-literate, purchasing choices.
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