by Libby Brooks
For richer and poorer, shopping has become a leisure activity. The unprecedented increase in consumption over the past fifty years has driven the search for fresh niche markets. Childhood is spliced into numerous needful stages, each requiring appropriate toys, clothes and entertainments. In addition to the teenage market, first targeted during the postwar economic boom, there are now pre-teens, tweens and tinies.
In a major research study released in 2005, the National Consumer Council (NCC) identified a generation of young people aged between ten and nineteen who were avid shoppers. Perhaps surprisingly, it noted that British children were more consumer-oriented than their peers in the United States, usually considered the progenitor of materialism.
Even the youngest in the sample were already keen consumers: the average ten-year-old had internalised between 300 and 400 brands. Brand recognition even amongst infants is astonishing. An earlier study by the International Journal of Advertising and Marketing to Children found that over two thirds of three-year-olds recognised the McDonald’s golden arches.
A combination of babies born fewer and later, working parents, and the by no means universal increase in disposable income has given children far greater influence over household purchasing decisions. With the advent of ‘pester-power’, advertisers have learnt to sell to them directly. Around six out of ten children in the NCC study said that they pestered parents for what they wanted, getting annoyed or slamming doors if the answer was ‘no’. But children’s own disposable income is also rising. According to a study by the Halifax, pocket money increased at more than four times the rate of inflation in 2005.
Staggering resources are mined into reaching this lucrative market, with companies drafting in child psychologists and extending their promotional activities ever more subtly, particularly through sponsorship in schools. Specialised marketing agencies sell advertising space in secondary schools and play areas. Other companies parade altruism in exchange for guaranteed brand recognition, like Cadbury’s offering free sports equipment to schools in exchange for vouchers from chocolate bars, or Walkers Crisps giving away free books.
Beyond the playground, as children’s leisure time becomes more contained, they spend many thousand of hours each year hopping between commercials on their multi-channel televisions, flipping through pop-ups as they surf the Internet, or clocking the product placements embedded in video games.
And children are now actively involved in the marketing process itself. Levi Strauss was the first company to recruit ‘cool’ kids to advise them. Brainstorming amongst young consumers is supposed to have led Heinz to produce its ‘E-Z squeeze’ bottles. Children can become co-creators of new computer games, testing pre-release versions in online communities. Others are recruited to ‘street teams’ – armies of underage PRs who are offered freebies and other inducements to promote new bands to their peers.
Stephen Kline argues that it was Victorian concern with the distinct nature of childhood, together with the increasing availability of manufactured goods, that fed the fledgling children’s market. A new interest in child development and welfare encouraged manufacturers to diversify into educational and medical products. Soon clothing and furniture – like smocks, pinafores and high chairs – were being designed exclusively for children.
The production of toys followed suit, chiming with a new ideal of modern consumer domesticity that can be seen in the advertising of the early 1900s. Kline writes: ‘The child with toys is a symbol of the pleasures of consumerism, of the new objects primarily designed for leisure and fantasy … Toys are fitting symbols of economic progress because they direct consumers to the rewards of leisure and relaxation. The recreated atmosphere of domestic consumption takes its emotional cues and mood from the absence of labour implied by a playful child.’
So the children’s market had as much resonance for adults. Professor Ellen Seiter, author of Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Cultures, observes how cultural changes throughout the twentieth century – in particular women’s involvement in the labour market – have increased the demand for toys: ‘In order for the volume of toy sales to have increased, families had to move to houses with space to keep the toys, and children had to have mothers who were so busy that they needed new ways to keep children entertained.’ The increase in children’s consumption, she argues, has been caused in part by the increasing difficulty in the job of caring for children.
Nowadays, however, that consumption is rising exponentially, and one extremity is swiftly superceded by the next: the toy of the film, the yoghurt of the cartoon, the padded bra of the doll. In the worst light, the industry looks like a monstrous behemoth, pushing sex and saturated fats, creating a generation of obese, promiscuous, celebrity-obsessed automatons, dependent on brands for identity, bullying the poor few who cannot afford the right trainers, unable to appreciate gratification that is anything other than instant.
But this presumes that children are innately free of cynicism, lacking any ability to discriminate. Are younger people especially at risk from the magical materialism that creates unnecessary needs and promises a fantasy world in which they are all fulfilled? Are children essentially more persuadable because they are less competent than adults? Or does some of this panic reflect certain assumptions about what it is to be a child?
David Buckingham, professor of education at London’s Institute of Education, has spent fifteen years investigating the impact of the media on children. An authority in his field, he treats child-panic with caution. From the extensive research that he has conducted, he believes that children can be wise consumers – at least as wise as adults – although he admits that just because someone has adequate defences they will not necessarily always use them. He also acknowledges the limitations of discussing advertising in isolation, as the lines between promotional messages and content in the media blur, and corporations employ ever-more-sophisticated means of getting round consumer cynicism.
Crucially, he argues that a false dichotomy has been set up between culture and commerce, with the latter seen to be polluting the former. But consumer culture is not just about manipulating authentic needs which exist in a purer sphere, says Buckingham. Consumer culture, unavoidably, ‘is now the arena where those very needs are defined, articulated and experienced.’ There is no sacred space, and childhood cannot be made to provide it.
The children in the NCC study certainly come across as enthusiastic but canny consumers. Although they were keen shoppers, most didn’t consider themselves particularly attached to promotion, with only three out of ten saying that they liked to watch adverts. Instead, many complained of commercial overload, citing the prevalence of intrusive and inappropriate marketing, which used sexual imagery or offered them overage goods that they were unable to buy.
Seven out of ten children said that they had felt ripped off by the false expectations set by advertising, while others referred to a more direct discrimination when shopping, believing that sales staff viewed them as second-class consumers and potential criminals.
Nevertheless, this sense of a hostile commercial environment appeared to have little impact on the children’s desire to buy. One of the most significant findings of the report was that children who have the least want the most. Those from the most disadvantaged households felt more keenly the discrepancy between their own ability to purchase and the possibilities of consumption presented to them. The NCC argued, ‘The aspiration gap does have long-term implications. Poorer children are more likely to leave school early. Keen to enter the adult consumer world, they are, compared to better-off children, more concerned to get a job and less concerned to build a career.’
Consumer culture would seem to operate in the same way that schooling can to exacerbate the negative effects of social comparison. It is the raison d’etre of advertising, after all, to convince people that without a particular product they are ‘losers’, and its prevalence offers children no chance to escape this edict.
T
he NCC concluded that greater regulation of all forms of marketing to children was essential. Much as children have the right to have their choices taken seriously and their capacity to make them respected, they have an equal right not to be bombarded and manipulated. But regulation alone risks falling back on the standard of the incompetent child.
The NCC has also pioneered the case for a national strategy for consumer education, which extends to children. The teaching of ‘media literacy’ builds young people’s skills by working with their interests as consumers, rather than against them.
Ellen Seiter argues that it is a mistake to judge children’s desires exclusively in terms of manipulation, greed or hedonism. She suggests that we need to break with the condemnation of children’s consumer culture in order to understand it. While acknowledging that children themselves don’t originate any of the symbols of this global subculture, she maintains that they can have a creative approach to consuming, making their own meanings from the stories and characters they see. Sometimes those meanings are entirely unanticipated, she says, noting the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which left the toy industry baffled.
While cautioning against a blindly utopian view, Seiter argues that children’s consumption can be understood as ‘a desire for a shared culture with their schoolmates and friends and a strong imagination of community’. This culture holds an ambiguous position between the domestic and public spheres, she says. ‘Sometimes … children feel their knowledge and mastery of consumer culture to be a kind of power: something they know, but of which adults are ridiculously ignorant.’
But others contend that this sense of mastery is also being manipulated by the market. Many adults are disturbed by the trend towards selling via inter-generational conflict. The American academic Juliet Schor, an expert on consumerism and economics, argues in her book Born to Buy that advertisers have perverted the venerable history of youth rebellion to create a powerful ‘anti-adultism’.
By subverting the notion of children as sophisticated and critical consumers, the idea of empowerment has been hijacked in order to sell more products. Schor notes that the world of children’s marketing is now filled with us-versus-them messages. ‘Marketers defend themselves against charges of anti-adultism by arguing that they are promoting kid empowerment,’ she writes. ‘[But] it’s important to recognise the nature of the corporate message: kids and products are aligned together in a really great, fun place, while parents, teachers and other adults inhabit an oppressive, drab, and joyless world. The lesson to kids is that it’s the product, not your parent, who’s really on your side.’
If children’s sense of mastery of consumer culture is being used to sell products back to them, then their power would appear to be voided. The conspiratorial separation of children from adults described here is certainly pernicious. But elsewhere, it is the blending of childhood with adulthood that confounds expectations.
As people of all ages come to define themselves ever more precisely through what they buy, consumer culture has facilitated a strange sort of levelling. Individuals, generations apart, are buying the same clothes, listening to the same music via the same technology, and reading the same books. From under-tens to over-forties, Topshop, Coldplay, iPods, and Harry Potter are binding buyers. Far from offering a self-generated window of rebellion before submission to adult responsibility, the market-devised cult of youth is now sold as accessible to anyone, of any age, provided they have the right model of mobile phone.
Perhaps this is an obvious satisfaction of demand. Just as children, not yet alert to mortality, want to be seen as older, so adults long to be thought younger. Maybe the elongation of ‘adulescence’ is inevitable as the population lingers further into adulthood before having children, and remains dependent on parents for longer.
But while commerce reaps the pennies of ‘kidults’, the genuinely youthful continue to find outlets for rebellion, often through subverting the imposed, homogenised ‘youth’ culture that attempts to usher them into branded conformity. Whether customising clothing or modifying cars for late-night races, creating alternative computer gaming universes in their bedrooms or perfecting their graffiti artistry on the streets, young people are continuing to form cultures of their own. There remains plenty to rebel against when, despite the fetishisation of commercially defined youth, young people’s modes of expression remain controlled, trivialised and feared.
Certainly, consumer culture has offered children access to areas of adult life from which they have traditionally been excluded. The desire to get older younger is not new. Adulthood has always meant freedom to the child who feels restricted, power to the child who feels weak, agency to the child who is deemed incapable. But the version of adulthood that it presents is not one of strength, but of conspicuous consumption.
When people complain that our culture has become infantilised, they do not really mean that they are defining childhood as a time of greed, irresponsibility and instant gratification. Like so much of child-panic, this tells us more about our fears for the adult world than about the reality of children’s experience. It is adulthood that has been most grossly distorted by consumer culture, and is presented to children, as well as grown-ups, as a venal, vapid, selfish place.
Nicholas, meanwhile, should offer a pinprick of hope that it may still be feasible to enjoy an unbranded childhood. A brand, according to Nicholas, is a sort of mark you make on someone’s skin. A slave was branded in the fourth book of his Roman mystery series.
Nicholas has been to MacDonald’s only about five times. The food’s not very good there and he doesn’t like the music. He only sees adverts if they’re between a programme he’s watching. He only likes adverts for his favourite programmes. He can’t remember any others, though there is one for MacDonald’s that shows quite often.
Unwitting anti-capitalist that he is, Nicholas ignores billboard posters, though nobody has especially told him to. ‘They’re trying to make people buy things or look at programmes. Sometimes they can be saying something’s gone down to half-price and that’s right, but they can exaggerate. Not all of the time, but most of the time.’
He has never bought something because he’s seen it advertised. The only logo he can think of is Gap, because it’s so big on the front of clothes. Trainers don’t have logos, he says. They have either laces or Velcro. He’s heard of Nike but he doesn’t know what they make.
‘When adverts are on the television I either go and get myself a chocolate biscuit or I pick up my book. Because there are adverts in every single programme!’ he explains with amazement. ‘Once there was a programme that was an hour long and I counted twenty adverts, and they were all about a minute long, so that was twenty minutes. And they were all advertising different bits to do with the programme, DVDs, videos, cuddly toys of the characters, these plastic toys of the characters, books about the film and everything. That’s the sort of thing that makes me mad because it’s really, really, really, really boring!’
This morning, Nicholas and Emma have been swimming. There are seven people in the house: ‘the cleaner, my au pair, and she’s got a friend round, then there’s you, there’s me, there’s my mum and there’s my sister.’ Emma is swooshing her wet rats’ tails around and sings a song about seven. Nicholas tells her to stop singing nonsense but she says it’s real.
Nicholas got a verruca from a swimming pool. The annoying thing is that the ointment puts a white film over it and each night before you put the next lot on you have to peel the film off and that really hurts, because the top of the verruca hurts more than normal skin. He removes his right sock to examine it. ‘My mum says I have to wear this sock every single day for a week, so it doesn’t get on too many socks. And it will also take three months to get rid of.’
He is damp-haired and droopy, sprawling on his tummy, then his side, across the bedroom floor. His mum brings in an array of chocolate biscuits. He seizes his first KitKat finger. ‘My mum shouldn’t have really done that.’
It is January now, and today is Twelfth Night. The adult population has given way to the threat and promise of new beginnings. But for still-holidaying Nicholas, the transforming wash of Christmas remains, though it is fading by the hour.
When he goes back to school, he’ll see his friends again. ‘Oh whoops! Oh bother!’ He’s been clambering over the sofa with the KitKat, and it’s fallen between the back and the wall. He ferrets down the gap. ‘It didn’t fall on the carpet, amazingly. It fell on that absolutely tiny thin ledge.’ He pulls out the sofa. The finger is sitting expectantly on the skirting board. There’s also a springing ball down there that he got out of a cracker. He kicks the plate on the floor as he rights himself. ‘I’m very careless today.’
But on the other hand, back at school he’ll be working again. ‘My mum wants me to work especially hard in maths because in Year 4 we get split into top and bottom maths groups and she wants me to be in the top of course.’ He probably will be, because he’s sheets ahead in tables.
‘If there’s one thing at my school, they give us too-easy spellings and too-easy times-table tests. I’ve actually skipped two times-tables sheets – I may have told you that before. And this was our spelling test for the last week of last term – “zoo,” “to”, “one”; it even had “cat”! We already know those things in Year 3!!’ His tone crescendos into outrage. ‘Most people in my class know how to spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!’
He’s glad about his Gameboy. Fifteen out of nineteen boys in his class have got them. Last term he felt sort of left out because he had to borrow everyone else’s. ‘But you’re not allowed them in school, which is annoying.’ He pauses. ‘But Jeremy brings one in. Somehow he’s got a secret compartment in his bag so no one ever finds it.’
