There are many cultural differences across the world and the picture I have painted above of the lives of babies and toddlers in a consumer society is only a fraction of the massive variety of experiences of young children across the world today. But it’s important to think of the child as embedded in a milieu of people and physical environments 17 which, with help from mum or other main caretaker, she has to navigate and the range of emotional, perceptual and cognitive experience that she will go through. I have mentioned the importance of considering the child and the environmental context together and I would also assume that this environment involves various acts of consumption such as buying tickets, 18 shopping, eating and so on. It’s rare however to see these issues discussed in the literature. One notable exception however is McNeal (2007) who studied children and their consumption patterns in China . He places consumer behaviour at the core of child and family life and analyses the ways children consume and their socialisation as consumers from infancy onward. In summary he sees the infant in two main stages of development (op. cit., pp. 27–29). During the first six months we see a shift away from reflexive behaviour, which is essentially the infant responding automatically with relatively fixed patterns of response such as gazing, head shifting and sucking to more adaptive behaviour to the objects in his environment. If she sees a toy hanging above her in the pram she will gurgle and gaze and grasp. If the hanging mobile is colourful, makes sounds and moves then recent research (Lickliter , 2011) has argued that the senses are more integrated than we originally thought and these complex perceptual patterns 19 are processed from an early age. Malls and stores also provide integrated and changing multi-stimulus arrays and infants find them fascinating and stimulating. 20 We have seen that faces have a special privilege in the range of visual stimuli that attract the child but moving objects in general seem to fascinate very young children most at birth (Valenza et al., 2015). Together with the rapidly developing motor skills that infants possess, we can see the rapid emergence of a child growing up in a sensorimotor 21 way. As the child becomes more mature we shall see the emergence of more sophisticated schemata when the child acquires language and other mediators as well as ways and strategies of controlling and deploying this new mental equipment.
The Object Concept: How Does This Relate to Children’s Understanding of Brands?
Children encounter objects in their lives. The nipple of the mother’s breast or bottle that gives satisfaction is one of the first and as the child becomes more able to look and grasp and explore they gradually begin to mentally separate their actions from what they are acting on. At the beginning of life outside the womb we assume that action and object are inextricably linked up as an event in the mind of the child. Piaget also predicted that children don’t understand what was called object permanence until 9 months or so and before then the object was wedded to one’s perception of it. If the object was placed out of sight it was literally out of mind. Baillargeon , Spelke, and Wasserman (1985, p. 192) put it more elegantly by envisioning the young infant imagining each disappearance [of an object] as an annihilation, with each reappearance viewed as a resurrection. However these authors were able to demonstrate using an ingenious experiment (Adam, 2013a, February 10) where infants saw a ‘magical event’ of an object disappearing then reappearing, that children of 5 months of age were able to show astonishment when they saw this happen but did not display surprise when the laws of physics were obeyed and an object went behind and came out again in a predictable way according to the way our world worked. This suggests that a set of expectations, a naïve or folk theory of physics if you like, is implicit in the minds of young infants. This means that if any of the principles of how the physical world are breached then the infant will see that as different from her routine perception of the world and pay close attention to it, get alarmed or fascinated by it and maybe display emotion. It’s as if there is a default which is how things usually are and that default mode is there and pre-set very early in development.
So at some stage in the first year of life expect your child to understand that for example his toy is still there when he turns to talk to you and that objects and what he does with them are separate in his mind. He is equipped with a concept of the object. In the supermarket, or at home or on TV the child will see objects that are sold as branded goods. But they are quite different depending on the setting in which they are found. This is where Bronfenbrenner ’s theory is useful. We need to specify the different ecologies at the microsystem level and they would include; the supermarket or mall or shop, the TV or online game or webpage, the fridge or larder at home , and in schoolbags, or as litter in the playground. 22 Each of these will contain brands but their roles are very different. Brands for sale in the supermarket are on their best behaviour, placed strategically and unopened so each pack is smart, on parade. Mum is pushing you in her cart or trolley, you’re facing her and she is picking stuff up and putting it in and concentrating. You try and communicate but perhaps the words don’t come and you cry and lean toward what you want and maybe use words like ‘up dere’ or ‘gimme’. On TV the brands are weird! The pack opens and the sweets fly through the air and there’s lots of great music and your favourite cartoon character why’s he there? You open the fridge and there’s some of your favourite creamy yoghurt but the pot been ripped and some has dripped onto the meat below. No thanks. You’re in the playground and swop some of your peanut butter (with bits—I don’t like bits) sandwich with chocolate from the boy with the red hair that smiles at you. We’re jumping ahead now to children at school but the job is same—to grasp the concept of the brand which is different and linked with different behaviours in all these settings. That’s why marketers will use a vivid single icon for the brand that can travel across all these different contexts. Tony the Tiger, tie-ins like Sponge Box Square Pants & Kellogg’s , McDonald’s & Disney, or just Ronald McDonald act as links to the pack for children to enable them to see the brand as the same across all these different contexts.
Once the child has achieved the freeing of the brand from the contexts of its occurrence as well as the actions that are associated with it, then the brand is conceptually independent. What this means is that gradually a realisation emerges that brands can be found in the gutter, in the fridge at home , on TV or in a videogame, or on the supermarket shelves and yet they are still brands. Referring to Bronfenbrenner’s model (see Chapter 3) you can see that the realisation that teachers have a life like your mum has or that you can learn out of school requires a certain permeability of the boundaries between one microsystem and the next and the child’s discovery of the brand as characteristic of certain objects can be explained in a similar way.
However the intimate relationship between acting on something like an object and how the object impacts the senses means that when designing objects that appeal to very young children we should consider what the child can do with them as well as what the object looks like, smells like or sounds like. Although the child won’t have these words in her vocabulary the concept of ‘cuddle-ability’ will be there in soft toys with friendly faces as the designer is incorporating the human face which as we have seen is attractive to the child perceptually and the texture of the toy which is cuddle-able. But it should also be designed so it tempts and affords the action of picking up and cuddling. The same goes for ‘explorability’ where the toy is perceptually appealing and looks like something to touch and poke and find hidden nooks and crannies but also encourages (with pick up handles for example) handling and throwing and all the sorts of things little ones do.
The Preschool Child
This part of our lives spans from 2 to 6 years of age but these age bands are always approximate. During infancy our senses and perceptual systems develop a lot and our motor skills, as we have seen in the section on infancy, develop from those of a relatively passive babe-in-arms to an active roaming toddler. Mental development accelerates during the preschool period of life as we start to repre
sent the world in our minds. When does this representing start? According to Piaget there are schemata , mental structures, available to us in infancy and they can be used for very basic problem solving. In one of his most illuminating observations cited by Flavell (1963, pp. 119–120) Piaget was playing with his daughter Lucienne aged 16 months who had a matchbox and a chain. She already had two schemata for getting the chain out of the box. Both had evolved and emerged from her experience of playing with things. One involved turning the box over and the chain falls out. No problem. The second was a little more involved. Piaget put the chain in the box and closed the slide leaving an opening, Lucienne tried the ‘turn it over so it falls out’ strategy like the last time, but that fails so her little finger goes in and scoops the chain out (the second strategy). Now comes the interesting bit. Piaget closes the box a bit more so the chain can just be seen but it’s too tiny even for baby fingers. Lucienne then tries out both schemata to no avail. Then she imitates the widening of the gap. After looking at the gap very attentively she opens and shuts her mouth, just a little bit at first then wider and wider. She repeats this a few times and then soon after she puts her finger in the gap and instead of trying to get the chain she makes the opening bigger. Success! The chain is withdrawn (Flavell, 1963, p. 120).
We now know from the research of Meltzoff and Moore (1983) that even in the first hour of life outside the womb the neonate will try and imitate facial expressions, so imitation will indeed be there as a schema . But Lucienne is still in infancy and can only use imitation as something she does. We can think imitation by representing it as language or visual imagery for example. So we have this wonderful principle of Piaget as the infant gradually moves into the world of the preschool child when physical action become internalised as mental thought. Later on Lucienne and other children will be able to think silently and we will have a new world to explore—the mind of the child. But at the moment Piaget’s observation above shows us the child on the brink of thinking but limited, as thinking is still acting or doing.
That’s Mine! Can Preschoolers Understand Ownership?
There is one paper (Gelman , Manczak, & Noles, 2012) that looked at the key concept of ownership in very young children from two to four years of age which is early in the preschool period . In order to understand the significance of these findings it’s necessary to make a quick excursion into our understanding of what preschool children can and cannot do, according to Piaget . Briefly, Piaget argued that the child at about three years of age was egocentric , literally self-centred, in the sense she was unable to take the viewpoint of the other person. So if you ask a child to choose a picture that represented a scene from a viewpoint different from the child’s own vantage point, the young child usually chose the one that was the same as his. However if you made the situation more ecologically valid for the child i.e. a situation the child could be engaged and involved in in her everyday life then the child could display the allocentric 23 skill required which was not what Piaget’s theory predicted. For example, Hughes and Donaldson (1979) gave young preschool children a bird’s eye view of a two by two grid plus a toy policeman and a toy little boy and the task was to ‘hide the doll so the policeman can’t see him’. Children had very little problem with this game, even when two policemen were introduced and placed so there was only one solution of a cell in the grid where from the vantage point of both policemen the little toy boy cannot be seen. They took to this problem because it was the stuff of comics, tales, and stories and very relevant to them. In my opinion Piaget’s grand theory that assumed we could describe general mental growth in the child from birth to adolescence does not do justice to the vast array of evidence that psychologists and others have accumulated over the decades since the middle of the twentieth century and the current emphasis on the importance of context on what children can and cannot do and how to theorise it. That is not to say that certain concepts that Piaget popularised such as egocentrism should be banished from discussions of child development as they are immensely useful just as Freud’s idea of, for example projection 24 can provide insights into human behaviour.
Going back to Gelman et al. (2012), the authors argued that ownership is an important acquisition in the mental development of the child (partly) because it doesn’t depend on how we perceive the object but rather its history is what’s important. Part of the thinking processes of preschool children involves comparing the perceived qualities of things. That boy’s really tall. You’re smelly! My house is bigger than yours. You’ve got more 25 sweets than me. Ownership is not obvious like that and it needs to be inferred. Also my slippers change and look different now after the dog has finished chewing them. But they’re still mine. So perception can’t be trusted if we’re talking ownership and we have to know the history and use it to define which is mine and what is yours. When children say that’s mine it’s a big mental achievement in terms of their understanding. Gelman , in her review of the literature and with her own experiments demonstrated that children do spontaneously track their own possessions i.e. their history in space over brief periods of time. Ownership appears to be an important skill for children and is another example of how, contrary to Piaget’s theory young preschool children are quite capable of going beyond the simple appearance of things in order to understand ideas that are not necessarily there directly as part of our awareness through our senses. She also provides evidence that 2–3-year-olds show the endowment effect where the value of an object increases simply because you own it.
Gelman et al. (op. cit., p. 1745) suggests that other non-obvious signs such as object value based on social status , (the example being a Ferrari car) could be looked at as well in young children and the consequences of the endowment effect being observed so early in the child’s life has consequences for consumer research across the lifespan that needs to be re-examined. For example there is a small area of research on the child’s understanding of symbolic value which is often carried using branding and marketing (Achenreiner & John , 2003) but these researchers were looking at 10–12-year-olds as the key period of development. Some work still needs to be done linking the research findings of Gelman et al. (2012) for the preschool group, with these pre-adolescents. There are also a host of other social and economic relationships that are of interest to consumer psychologists that surround the idea of ownership and Nancekivell , Van de Vondervoort, and Friedman (2013) have reviewed this literature and I have summarised 26 their review here. We have seen from Gelman et al. (2012) that young preschoolers can acquire the abstract concept of ownership and much of the review demonstrates that older children can reason with it in a remarkably sophisticated way given the available theory on cognitive abilities of 3-year-olds. So 3-year-olds know that gift exchange entails transfer of ownership if the gift giving is signalled like being wrapped up and by 4 years they realise that if one of the gifts in a gift exchange is stolen then the ownership exchange doesn’t work. By 4 or 5 years they realise that ownership can be acquired by purchase. But at 3–4 years they also think (falsely) that transforming for example a lump of Play Doh into a toy doll also transfers the ownership to the ‘manufacturer’ e.g. the child who made it. By 6 years of age they think that the first person to find something desirable can then claim ownership. 27 Also at this age they believe abstract things like ideas can be owned and the first person to have the idea owns it.
Children’s ideas about ownership give a fascinating insight into their world. One of the earliest observations of ownership is the cry of a 2-year-old: “That’s mine”. Using play with puppets, we can see that children protest if the puppet takes or threatens to take their property, but not necessarily if it takes the property of other children. From 2.5 years, children often are less likely to share their property and hold on to their own things compared with objects that belong to the class. We can see that even at this early age these youngsters are acquiring the skills and understanding the nature of the society we live in.
In a rec
ent paper Huh and Friedman (2017) looked at whether children understood the idea that ownership could be shared amongst others in a group and those readers who hold an optimistic view of human nature will be heartened to hear that even at 3 years of age children already understand that certain objects are group-owned by judging that certain items can belong to a whole family rather than to particular family members and in a similar experiment that some items belong to a team rather than to a particular member of the team. Throughout the preschool period children’s understanding of group and individual rights become more nuanced so by 5–6 years they think that it is more acceptable for a group member to take group property than for a non-member to do this, and 4–6 year-olds thought that group members can take more group resources than non-members.
Number and Piaget’s Ideas About Conservation
We now turn to a classic finding in the mental life of the preschool child . It’s called ‘conservation of number ’. Conservation here means that number has the property of not changing if you change the shape of the set of objects being counted. So a long line of coins laid out along the kerb may look a lot compared with coins crammed into a bottle (or maybe if you focus on the density of the coins in the bottle you might guess there’s more there). But that doesn’t matter—number can be assessed by counting and it only changes if you add or take away. To put it more technically—number is invariant under transformations of shape and only changes under operations of addition and subtraction. Now it’s important for children to know this if they are going to understand any arithmetic and operate successfully as consumers . According to Piaget preschool children cannot conserve number. The importance about conservation of number is that, once you understand it then it becomes part of the way the world works. It would be a strange magical world if it didn’t work that way, as people could be short-changed simply by the appearance of things. However the assessment requires the child to pay close attention , remember some information, and know what words arranged in a complex question mean. In addition the young child is being asked questions he has probably not been asked before and has to work out what the experimenter is saying to him. As a consequence, a lot of research has been published that tries to establish just what was going on here and whether we are underestimating the skills of the preschool child . In my opinion there is a lot of evidence that the skills required by the child to comprehend and understand what the original experiment on conservation of number was trying achieve are confounded with the main goal of the assessment procedure. At the moment we can assume that number conservation is usually not completely understood in the preschool period . But children can and will exercise various skills associated with number such as pointing and counting all the items in a set. We have seen how conservation of number is achieved at the end of the preschool period . Do children younger than that understand money? There is little research on how preschool children understand financial issues because although they are aware of the concept of payment and the exchanging of cards, coins, notes for goods, they don’t yet have an understanding of the tokens of exchange until 6 years or so (Te’eni-Harari , 2016). We’ll return to that when we look at children of school age.
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