ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades, children have become increasingly important both as a market in their own right and as a means to reach adult markets. Commercial companies are targeting children more directly and at an ever-younger age; and they are using a much wider range of techniques that go well beyond conventional advertising. Marketers often claim that children are becoming ‘empowered’ in this new commercial environment: the market is seen to be responding to needs and desires on the part of children that have hitherto been largely ignored or marginalized, not least because of the social dominance of adults. However, critics have expressed growing concern about the apparent ‘commercialization’ of childhood. Popular publications, press reports and campaigns have addressed what are seen to be the damaging effects of commercial influences on children’s physical and mental health. Far from being ‘empowered’, children are typically seen here as victims of a powerful, highly manipulative form of consumer culture that is almost impossible for them to escape or resist. This debate inevitably reflects broader assumptions about childhood – about what children are,
or what they should be. Children, it is assumed, are different from adults in key respects: they possess particular characteristics, needs or vulnerabilities, which mean they should be treated in different ways. These claims can in principle be subjected to empirical examination. Yet this debate is also to some extent a normative one: in making claims about what we want children to be or to become, we are also asserting fundamental values to do with the kind of society we want. The theories and methods that researchers use in exploring such phenomena – and indeed the issues and questions they choose to explore in the first place – are also bound to reflect these broader values and assumptions. This chapter aims to explore some of the ways in which the figure of the child consumer is defined or constructed, by campaigners, by marketers and by academic researchers. In doing so, it argues that we need to move beyond the polarized terms in which this debate is typically framed, and to address the social and cultural contexts of children’s consumption practices.
In recent years, there has been a flurry of popular critical publications about children and consumer culture: prominent examples include Schor’s Born to Buy (2004), Linn’s Consuming Kids (2004) and Mayo and Nairn’s Consumer Kids (2009). Other popular books in this vein include discussions of children’s consumption alongside broader arguments about the apparent demise of
traditional notions of childhood – as in the case of Palmer’s Toxic Childhood (2006). The arguments in these publications are, by and large, far from new. One can look back to similar arguments being made in the 1970s, for example by groups like Action for Children’s Television in the United States (Hendershot, 1998); or to announcements of the ‘death of childhood’ that have regularly recurred throughout the past two centuries (e.g., Postman, 1983). Even so, there now seems to be a renewed sense of urgency in these claims. Such books typically presume that children used to live in an essentially non-commercial
world, or a kind of idyllic ‘golden age’. Many of them link the issue of consumerism with other well-known concerns about media and childhood: as well as turning children into premature consumers, the media are accused of promoting sex and violence, obesity, drugs and alcohol, gender stereotypes and false values, and taking children away from other activities that are deemed to be more worthwhile. Of course, this is a familiar litany, which tends to conflate very different kinds of effects and influences. It constructs the child as innocent, helpless, and unable to resist the power of the media. Thus, these texts describe children as being bombarded, assaulted, barraged, even subjected to ‘saturation bombing’ by media: they are being seduced, manipulated, exploited, brainwashed, programmed and branded. And the predictable solution here is for parents to engage in counter-propaganda, to censor their children’s use of media, or simply keep them locked away from corrupting commercial influences. These books rarely include the voices of children, or try to take account of their perspectives: this is essentially a discourse generated by adults on behalf of children. Meanwhile, there has been a parallel growth in marketing discourse specifically focused on
children. Again, there is a long history of this kind of material. As Cook (2004) and Jacobson (2004) have shown, the early decades of the twentieth century saw marketers increasingly addressing children directly, rather than their parents. In the process, they made efforts to understand the child’s perspective, and began to construct the child as a kind of authority, not least by means of market research. In recent years, however, this kind of marketing discourse has proliferated, most notably in relation to the newly-identified category of the ‘tween’. More recent examples would include del Vecchio’s Creating Ever-Cool (1997) and Sutherland and Thompson’s Kidfluence (2003); although perhaps the most influential account is Lindstrom’s BRANDchild (2003), which is the basis of a major consultancy business that has effectively become a brand in its own right. The most striking contrast between these accounts and those of the critics of consumer
culture is their very different construction of the child consumer. The child is seen here as sophisticated, demanding and hard-to-please. Tweens, we are told, are not easily manipulated: they are an elusive, even fickle market, sceptical about the claims of advertisers, and discerning when it comes to getting value for money – and they need considerable effort to understand and to capture. Of course, given the political pressure that currently surrounds the issue of marketing to children (most notably around so-called ‘junk food’), marketers are bound to argue that advertising has very little effect, and that children are ‘wise consumers’. Yet this idea of the child as sovereign consumer often elides with the idea of the child as a citizen, or an autonomous social actor, and with the notion of children’s rights; and it is often accompanied by a kind of ‘anti-adultism’ – an approach that is very apparent, for example, in the marketing of the global children’s television channel Nickelodeon (Banet-Weiser, 2007). To use one of Nickelodeon’s key marketing slogans, in the new world of children’s consumer culture, kids rule.
