Pester power...

It is not a secret that children have a big impact on their parents. This may be related to many things such as behaviour, but the most important is marketing influence. Marketers are aware that children are a key to their parent’s money. It is called pester power: the power children have, by repeated nagging, of influencing their parents to buy advertised or fashionable items.

Quoting Beder (2009) Advertisers spend 100s of billions of dollars a year worldwide encouraging, persuading and manipulating people into a consumer lifestyle that has devastating consequences for the environment through its extravagance and wastefulness. Advertising exploits individual insecurities, creates false needs and offers counterfeit solutions. It fosters dissatisfaction that leads to consumption. Children are particularly vulnerable to this sort of manipulation.

As it is said in International Journal of Advertising: the more often children ask, the more they receive. We can analyse if it is ethical to advertise products to the youngest generation, which does not have their own money, however according to Direct Marketing magazine, by the age of eight children make most of their own buying decisions.

Kasser says "Psychologists who help advertisers are essentially helping them manipulate children to believe in the capitalistic message, when all the evidence shows that believing in that message is bad for people."

There is a very interesting TV program related to children’s attitude towards media and modern advertising. A key slogan heard in that program is “children grow older younger”. It is a sentence which seem to be fundamental in discussion about marketing toward the youngest. What is more, brand recognition is a reason why kids choose one product instead of another. Even the smallest people (in nursery) were able to recognize the most popular brands such as Pepsi, Lego or Barbie. They were not interested when they did not know brand. What is interesting, children as young as age three recognize brand logos (Fischer, 1991), with brand loyalty influence starting at age two (McNe

al, 1992).

The average young person views more than 3000 ads per day on television (TV), on the Internet, on billboards, and in magazines. Increasingly, advertisers are targeting younger and younger children in an effort to establish "brand-name preference" at as early an age as possible. This targeting occurs because advertising is a $250 billion/year industry with 900 000 brands to sell and children and adolescents are attractive consumers: teenagers spend $155 billion/year, children younger than 12 years spend another $25 billion, and both groups influence perhaps another $200 billion of their parents' spending per year.Increasingly, advertisers are seeking to find new and creative ways of targeting young consumers via the Internet, in schools, and even in bathroom stalls. (Pediatrics website, 2006)

Conclusion ? “no brand = no product = no identity = no sales”

Marketing to children should be carefully restricted. In particular advertisements aimed at children under the age of 9 years old, including on the internet and during children's television programmes, should be banned. Such advertising subsidises the cost of these services at the cost of our children's values, sense of well-being, health and integrity. Moreover the future of the planet is at stake if we allow advertisers and marketers to turn children into hyper consumers of the future.