Children, Marketing To

The marketing of products to children is not a new phenomenon, and certainly, the historical record is rife with examples of popular product campaigns geared toward children. However, recent decades have seen an unprecedented expansion in marketing efforts aimed at children. Such efforts involve both direct and indirect forms of marketing to children. Direct marketing to children involves advertising and related activities geared toward soliciting children's awareness of and interest in specific products. Indirect forms of marketing to children involve similar efforts devoted to creating consciousness of products designed for younger persons among parents and others responsible for purchasing products for children. The average child now views tens of thousands of television and print advertisements every year, and magazines, television shows, and Web sites aimed exclusively at children provide a fertile medium for marketers to appeal to this audience directly. Indeed, the line between entertainment and advertisement is now routinely blurred in the television programs and movies viewed by children, which are often closely connected to marketing campaigns that sell toys, games, and other products centered on the characters and themes of these shows. Furthermore, marketing departments have become increasingly sophisticated in the their attempts to appeal to children, often making use of extensive market research on the buying habits of children and the expertise of child psychologists in developing marketing strategies.

Essentially interconnected with the expansion of marketing to children is the increased disposable wealth of children, who now directly spend billions of dollars every year on toys, games, and other products. Children are also indirectly responsible for influencing billions of dollars in adult expenditures on food, clothing, vacations, and assorted goods and services. There is, thus, no doubt that children represent an important element in the modern consumer economy.

In this sense, some have seen the expansion in direct marketing to children as simply responding to the increased purchasing power of this segment of the population. Nonetheless, this proliferation in the number of products marketed to children as well as in the techniques used to market these products has raised a number of concerns about the ethical status of many of these efforts. While some of the concerns raised about marketing efforts directed at children reflect more general questions about marketing ethics, others rest on more specific concerns with the practices of marketing to children. Ethical concerns of the latter type often stem from considerations of the differences between adult and children consumers. Because of these differences, most ethicists argue that higher ethical, and often regulatory, standards are appropriate for the marketing of products to children.