ABSTRACT

Children, alongside their parents, were one of China’s fi rst consumer groups to be targeted by both foreign and domestic marketing and manufacturing companies. Long-time observers like myself watched as fi rst entire fl oors of city department stores and then whole department stores themselves were stocked with a colourful profusion of children’s clothes, toys, foods and other goods. These were soon followed by single-designer or -branded shops in downtown shopping streets and malls. Children and their parents were also one of the fi rst groups to be courted by television and other media advertisements publicising the educational, physical and other juvenile benefi ts of product after product – both foreign and domestic in origin. Indeed it can be argued that children rapidly became the single most important new category of consumers in China. That children and their parents early attracted international and national attention from manufacturers, retailers and advertisers is perhaps not surprising for it is now widely acknowledged across the continents that it is children who have become one of the most signifi cant and determined of age-groups in generating and absorbing successive waves of new consumer goods. Advertisers the world over recognise that children comprise not one but three markets: they are a ‘primary market’ currently spending their own money on their own wants and needs; they are an ‘infl uence market’ that determines much of the spending of their parents; and they are a ‘future market’ given all the goods and services that will be purchased in their adult years.1 Thus children are seen to have more market potential than any other demographic category and, in China too, children and their parents were early targeted by the major child-oriented global brands, such as Heinz, Johnson & Johnson, Disney and Gap, who were eager to enter China and take advantage of this large and fastgrowing market. In the fi rst decades of reform many such international companies and their products became widely known in China’s metropolitan cities and their suburban hinterlands. In the mid-1990s, a director of a Hong Kong and Chinese advertising fi rm undertook a 5-month survey of Chinese children and concluded that the present expansion was but the beginning:

Obviously everybody’s interested in Chinese kids at the moment. Western marketeers are particularly interested in them because they have a whole range of global brands which have worked in other parts of the world, and they are interested to bring [these] to China.2