ABSTRACT
The psychological study of children as consumers has been investigated over the past 70 years. Lester Guest authored what was arguably the rst study of children as a future consuming market in the Journal of Applied Psychology article “The genesis of brand awareness” (Guest, 1942). Guest discusses an experiment on a sample of 8-18-year-olds who reported their recognition of brand names in several product categories, and argues that brand name recognition is an indicator of their future brand preferences and choices. Guest (1942, p. 803) proposes that the children will have “brand knowledge” for the brands they recognize by name alone. He further argues that the children’s recognition of a brand may strongly inuence their later preferences. Guest’s (1948, 1955) later articles were based on follow-up longitudinal surveys of his original sample and failed to nd a link between children’s early brand name recognition and their later purchase and use of the brand. Nonetheless, these theoretical assumptions and the measure of memory continue to be used in research on children (Fischer, Schwartz, Richards, Goldstein, & Rojas, 1991; Pierce, Choi, Gilpin, Farkas, & Berry, 1998). The early interest of marketers in children as a future market later evolved into their interest in children as a market to target.
