Understanding Children as Consumers by David Marshall

Author:David Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446246412
Publisher: Sage Publisher
Published: 2010-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

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Four aims were listed at the beginning of this chapter. The first was to provide a description of how the child’s understanding of advertising and promotional activity develops from birth to adolescence using different streams of development that have been described and theorized by psychologists. So, for example, the very young infant taking her first tour of the supermarket in a trolley pushed by mum or dad has to make sense of a new brightly coloured world of goods and lots of other people also doing this strange new activity. It’s the young child’s job to make sense of this place. She will draw associations between the brands found there and those at home and in ads on TV. She will see these people line up and pack stuff and hand over money (or more commonly hand over a card) and later on will begin to understand what that means. This site – the marketplace – has been a core activity for adults and their families since trading began in society. Children have played and will always play an important role there as their growing up starts in the supermarket and ends up by hanging out at the mall.

Two of the most common aspects of what have been called the ‘unintended’ consequences of advertising are obesity and materialism. The ebb and flow of materialism across the lifespan from childhood through adolescence is described and the possibility of more than one explanation is explored. There are also definitional issues surrounding a slippery concept like materialism and we should be sceptical of easy solutions to this complex problem. The unique cocktail of social influences involving parents, friends, media, and most importantly how each child resolves these different pressures, must be considered when answering the question – what makes children more or less materialistic?

Obesity is part of a multifactorial problem, variously attributed to a balance sheet where there’s too much coming in (diet) and too little being expended (exercise); to an environment where the cards are stacked in the direction of too much sedentary sitting around and too much high energy food being eaten; to cultural influences, and genetic factors, and individual differences in the physiology of metabolism – and the list grows longer every day. So where is advertising in all this? Most commentators believe that advertising and marketing have an influence on diet and that this influence, as measured by effect size, is not very strong. Diet itself has a major influence on obesity. And how do we put all these together? Well let’s see where research should be going in these areas.

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