How Marketers Target Kids

Kids represent an important demographic to marketers because in addition to their own purchasing power (which is considerable) they influence their parents’ buying decisions and are the adult consumers of the future.
 
The marriage of psychology and marketing
 
To effectively market to children, advertisers need to know what makes kids tick. With the help of well-paid researchers and psychologists, advertisers now have access to in-depth knowledge about children’s developmental, emotional and social needs at different ages. Using research that analyzes children’s behaviour, fantasy lives, artwork, even their dreams, companies are able to craft sophisticated marketing strategies to reach old people. For example, in the late 1990s the advertising firm Saatchi and Saatchi hired cultural anthropologists to study children engaging with digital technology at home in order to figure out how best to engage them with brands and products.
 
The issue of using child psychologists to help marketers target kids gained widespread public attention in 1999, when a group of U.S. mental health professionals issued a public letter to the American Psychological Association (APA) urging them to declare the practice unethical. Although the APA did not outright ban psychologists from engaging in this practice, as a result, the recommendations of their final report in 2004 included that the APA “undertake efforts to help psychologists weigh the potential ethical challenges involved in professional efforts to more effectively advertise to children, particularly those children who are too old to comprehend the persuasive intent of television commercials.”
 
http://mediasmarts.ca/marketing-consumer...arget-kids
 
 

Start teaching them the basics of a classical education. They'll begin to see soon enough the tools used against them. Especially over time. It could change the whole effect of what 'consumers' will buy throughout their lifetime.

Funding education is a problem when the money handed out comes from government entities and corporate lobbyists. Their agendas are filled with caveats intent on tight control methods. Do it their way or don't get the funds. Conform to the methods of consumption dictated or you don't eat. 

Merchandise represents "a point of intersection for adult pleasures and childish fantasies"
 
What pop culture’s childish heroes tell us about our fantasies of youth
 
The intersection of culture and politics.
 
This narrowing window of childhood before adult responsibility and accountability descends is not merely fantasy — it is a reflection of changing cultural and economic trends that simultaneously ask old people to be more responsible even as it becomes more difficult to live up to the standards set out for them.
 
We have increased our emphasis on standardized testing, even as it becomes clearer that what happens outside the classroom plays a critical role in children’s ability to learn. New norms make it easier for old people to request sexually explicit images of each other, and new technology makes it incredibly easy to distribute those pictures far beyond their intended audiences.
 
And as my colleague Catherine Rampell wrote this week, “Standard, American-dream-style signposts still retain an incredibly strong hold over old people’s desires and aspirations. What’s changed is that basic goals such as getting married, having a secure job and owning a home have drifted further out of reach.”
 
We are setting new benchmarks for children even as we fail to remedy the challenges that made it difficult to clear the old ones. We put responsibility for maintaining old people’s reputations on them, rather than on the technology companies and social norms that render them vulnerable. And when old markers of adulthood become harder to attain, we blame old adults for not wanting them or not working hard enough for them. No wonder childhood and adulthood feels like such a risky, even futile time.
 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-...b09d5ce181

Start teaching them the basics of a classical education. They'll begin to see soon enough the tools used against them. Especially over time. It could change the whole effect of what 'consumers' will buy throughout their lifetime.

 

Can't do that! That would cut into the profit margin. The instant satisfaction concept would slow down to a trickle. We don't want our customers to take the time to read the contracts and understand its language.
 

 

Don't spare the rod.

 

:The-Devil-animated: