Blog@GraceJunction

A friend of mine once took his dad for finishing some errands and to visit some friends. His dad never knew riding I suppose, but from the time he sat behind my friend’s two-wheeler, he kept on giving directions about what to do, when to change gears, when to apply brakes, whether to speed up or slow down, which road to take etc. Since it was his dad, my friend obliged and his dad’s assertions just grew stronger and stronger! At one particular point during their adventurous journey, his dad literally tore him apart for his allegedly irresponsible riding! That was it. The last straw. My friend stopped his vehicle. He asked his dad to get down. When he did, my friend quietly rode off asking him to reach home on a rickshaw!

We have had many a laughs about that incident, and poor uncle learnt a hard lesson that day. Now, by no means have I cited this incident to celebrate my friend’s decision making skills. It was not a good thing by any (Indian) standards. But I have highlighted the incident just to bring to your notice what happens when someone is victimised by back seat driving. Its really bugging when there is someone with you who gives you directions all the time. It’s as if they don’t trust your skills at all and also that they are judging distances and anticipating objects and vehicles better than you! It can be annoying.

However, strangely, unnaturally, I think more and more people are preferring ‘Backseat driving’! How you may ask? What else will you call it when kids start making decisions in the family! It is a well accepted fact especially in the advertising circles that kids are making many of the buying decisions these days, at least influencing them greatly. There are avenues that have opened up thanks to internet, scores of TV channels and other media, wherein the kids are also building up a purchasing power of their own, in many cases more than their own parents! Why should they not make the decisions then?

Industry spending on advertising to children has exploded in the past decade, increasing from a mere $100 million in 1990 to more than $2 billion in 2000 and manifold since then. Here are some of the strategies marketers employ to target children and teens:

Pester Power
“Pester power” refers to children’s ability to nag their parents into purchasing items they may not otherwise buy. Marketing to children is all about creating pester power, because advertisers know what a powerful force it can be.

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, art work, even their dreams, companies are able to craft sophisticated marketing strategies to reach young people.

Building brand name loyalty
Marketers plant the seeds of brand recognition in very young children, in the hopes that the seeds will grow into lifetime relationships. According to the Center for a New American Dream, babies as young as six months of age can form mental images of corporate logos and mascots. Brand loyalties can be established as early as age two, and by the time children head off to school most can recognize hundreds of brand logos. This strategy was embraced very quickly by fast food, toy and clothing companies. Now even banks, hotels, airlines, and automakers are getting into the act.

Buzz or street marketing
Many companies are using “buzz marketing”—a new twist on the tried-and-true “word of mouth” method. The idea is to find the coolest kids in a community and have them use or wear your product in order to create a buzz around it. Buzz, or “street marketing,” as it’s also called, can help a company to successfully connect with the savvy and elusive teen market by using trendsetters to give their products “cool” status. Buzz marketing is particularly well-suited to the Internet, where young “Net promoters” use newsgroups, chat rooms and blogs to spread the word about music, clothes and other products among unsuspecting users.

Commercialization in education
School used to be a place where children were protected from the advertising and consumer messages that permeated their world—but not any more. Budget shortfalls are forcing school boards to allow corporations access to students in exchange for badly needed cash, computers and educational materials. Corporations realize the power of the school environment for promoting their name and products. A school setting delivers a captive youth audience and implies the endorsement of teachers and the educational system. Marketers are eagerly exploiting this medium in a number of ways, including:

• Sponsored educational materials,
• Supplying schools with technology in exchange for high company visibility,
• Exclusive deals with fast food or soft drink companies to offer their products in a school or district,
• Advertising posted in classrooms, school buses, on computers, etc. in exchange for funds,
• Sponsoring school events,
• Contests and incentive programs e.g. Pizza Hut launched reading incentives program in which children receive certificates for free pizza if they achieve a monthly reading goal.

The Internet
It’s part of the youth culture. This generation of young people is growing up with the Internet as a daily and routine part of their lives. Parents generally do not understand the extent to which kids are being marketed to online. Kids are often online alone, without parental supervision. Unlike broadcasting media, which have codes regarding advertising to kids, the Internet is unregulated. Sophisticated technologies make it easy to collect information from young people for marketing research, and to target individual children with personalized advertising.

Marketing adult entertainment to kids
Children are often aware of and want to see entertainment meant for older audiences because it is actively marketed to them. The movie, music and video games industries routinely market violent entertainment to young children. Marketing plans include TV commercials run during hours when young viewers were most likely to be watching. Music containing “explicit-content” labels were targeted at young people through extensive advertising in the most popular teen venues on television, and radio, in print, and online. Even toys based on Restricted movies and M-rated video games are marketed to children as young as four.

The advertisers are winning handsdown and earning good money for a job well done. The tragedy is that parents (especially the fathers) are unwilling to stand up and hold the reins too either because they have their hands full chasing their own dreams and aspirations or because they have no motivation for it at all! We have all ingredients of a tug of war, but no war at all. The marketeers to push, the kids to pull but no one at the other end because parents are unwilling to fight their children!

Many parents, especially in India, feel they never got the best while they were growing up, and so they need to give their children the best. They were never consulted for decisions while they grew up and they would not do that to their own children. Now they allow their children all the privileges. And why not? In many cases it pays to let them call the shots!!

Guilt plays a role in spending decisions as time-stressed parents substitute material goods for time spent with their kids.

More disposable income because of smaller family size, dual incomes and postponement of children till later in life are other reasons why parents are affording to buy more for their kids and also as per their demands.

When I was fifteen, I thought I was very smart, till I became twenty. I looked back at my teenage and laughed. “It’s now that I have matured”, so I thought till I became twenty-five and looked back. The same feelings can be traced when I became thirty. And the very same today morning. However informed one becomes, there is something that only age can rub into us, many things that only time can make us absorb.

What’s the fall-out? With decision making allowed at almost every stage even in the presence of parents, kids gain in confidence and adventure to decide about things that they know nothing about. They don’t think it is important to consult parents for anything, because, even normally its the parents who are consulting them! They indulge in activites and relationships that would normally be unacceptable to their familes. They buy and view stuff that their parents would not approve of.

Just for the sake of letting them know who is it that makes all the buying decisions, parents should keep the final approval rights with them. Kids cannot understand a lot of dynamics of the adult world till they are that old. The parents should also make decisions that set an example for their children to follow. The father should impact by example.

There is so much more that my mind is allowing in at this point but its already a very long blog. Parents should hold all driving controls with them, allowing them comforts and luxuries and security, but also letting them know, who calls the shots. This is in the greater good of the society and the long term good of the kids themselves. Just a look around and you can spot a lot of problems in society just because of improper, loose or no parenting at all.

Parents should let the kids know that backseat driving is not welcome.

The Bible says, “Train up a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Till they are adults themselves, God has entrusted these little individuals in our care to impact their lives in such a way that they are useful to God and man, and not just become self-centered and pleasure and fame seeking social brutes.

The Bible also say that “Kids are like arrows”, which means that parents are the Bows. They decide the pull on the string, the angle and the direction that these arrows will take. Decision making is the prerogative of the parents, at least till the age that the governement considers them as adults, whatever be the matter decided upon.

I rest my case.

Tags: Ads in School, Impact of Advertising, parenting

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Articles, Finance & Money, Geo, Internet, Marriage, Purpose of Life, Relationships, Society, Trends, Troubles & Problems, Video Games, Workaholic, Youth Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.