Consumer Psychology
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As children grow up and begin to understand other people, built on the human predisposition to be attracted to and find human characteristics like other people’s faces appealing, she will see brands with celebrity endorsement and character endorsement particularly desirable. Yaşare (2016) also found that brand awareness was present at 3 years of age, mainly for brands targeted at children. However when character endorsed brands were looked at then the character presented alone meant very little to them. In the context of the package though it was meaningful and they could remember the product. Such a link where a cartoon character becomes strongly identified with the brand is characteristic of anthropomorphisation when human characteristics become closely associated with inanimate objects (see Chapter 4 and section on “Brand Priming” ). In an in-depth study of both brand managers and children (Hémar-Nicolas & Gollety, 2012) it would appear that brands-with-characters are more easily remembered, can invoke a wide range of emotions and generally speaking enable the various brands to become more distinctive and different in the child’s mind, thereby increasing the range of different brands that children can assimilate. In other words attaching characters to brands turn a pack into a gateway to a colourful, three-dimensional world for the child.
Executive Functioning
One other development in the child was mentioned by McAlister and Cornwell (2010) and that was the emergence of executive functioning . This is a generic term covering a variety of skills and is an essential part of one’s mental equipment for getting things done. For the developing child, planning , controlling impulsive tendencies and sticking to the rules are three important skills to have at the early stages of executive functioning. The authors were able to assess these and found that they are an important part of being able to have mental representations of brands.
It is important to recognise that as the child grows up there are two main streams of achievement. One is acquiring new skills and generally understanding the way the world works. Traditionally developmental psychologists have focussed on this and created models and theories of the processes emerging and the extent to which mental growth, and learning through experience both contribute to this eventual understanding and world view of children at different ages. The second is equally important and maybe more so. What do we do with it, this new understanding? Knowledge should be translatable into action, both social and individual and we need to focus on how children learn to organise, control and execute plans. This is commonly known as executive functioning and can be seen emerging in children of preschool age and even younger (Bernier , Carlson , & Whipple, 2010). It has been associated with a slow-maturing part of the brain known as the pre-frontal cortex which develops through adolescence into one’s early adulthood so it is generally recognised that there is a maturational component in executive functioning as that part of the brain changes over the years. Learning can also occur and children can improve executive functioning as they grow up. During the preschool period parent(s) or other significant adults in the life of the child can play a role in enhancing executive function. Bernier et al. (2010) looked at the development of working memory , inhibitory control , planning , and set shifting in children. All of these skills are part of executive functioning. Working memory is storing enough information in memory for as long as it takes to solve a problem and is very useful when doing mental arithmetic for example. An example of inhibitory control would be suppressing desire to do something else for a while as you need to pay attention to a task. Planning is just that, mentally working through the best course of action. ‘Set shifting ’ is a bit more opaque as the word ‘set’ in psychology has the technical meaning of preparedness to carry out one action or generally to be set in one direction of thinking or holding certain attitudes etc. so the expression then means being able to change from, for example sorting things on the basis of colour to sorting them on the basis of shape (which is an age appropriate task for pre-schoolers). Can these be facilitated in preschool children? Bernier et al. (2010) obviously think so as they identify executive function as a feature of growing up that depends a lot on care giving influences which should also provide time and opportunity to have a significant impact on the developing structures 4 (op. cit., pp. 327–328). So let’s see how exactly these care giving influences can impact on the emerging executive function in children.
Carlson (2003) identified three dimensions of parenting that encourages just this sort flexibility in executive functioning . Firstly she identified maternal sensitivity as involving appropriate and consistent responses to infants’ signals, and these are best described by Pedersen and Moran (1995). Mothers who are maternally sensitive will know where the toddler is at all times while maintaining attention to ongoing tasks, addressing the child directly, recognising distress and responding to it successfully. Insensitivity is demonstrated by a lack of synchrony with the toddler, lack of recognition of the toddler’s emotional state and inability to provide inappropriate response, perhaps reflected by perfunctory affect and an occasional rather mechanical kiss on the head. These are only part of the extensive checklist available in Pederson and Moran’s (1995) paper. The second dimension is scaffolding , a metaphor first attributed to Vygotsky (1978) with his idea of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and also by Bruner (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). Scaffolding is frequently used in the developmental literature as a metaphor for the support given to the child while she is learning. The ZPD is part of the trajectory of learning that ranges from ‘totally incapable of…’ to ‘can do it automatically’. So riding a bicycle, and learning to read would be examples and the ZPD would be the range from ‘just starting’ to ‘can do it on his own now’ when the help given by mum or dad is invaluable at the earlier stages. The adult can provide scaffolding or support through that particular transition in all three areas; emotional support , task related understandings , and motivational inspiration . Peer support and collaborative learning are other aspects of ZPD and scaffolding . It also provides an alternative collaborative and cooperative vision of how learning can and maybe should proceed and provides a challenge to the predominant values of individual achievement and success that symbolise success in many societies. Parents who use scaffolding when interacting with their children can enhance the child’s development of executive functioning. And finally, using mental constructs when talking and relating to your child will enhance their use and understanding of these concepts . There is evidence that what is called ‘mind-mindedness ’ will help the child’s own developing lay psychology of other people’s minds (so-called ‘theory of mind’). This is where the caregiver is able to take on board, mentally, the needs, wants, emotions and possible thoughts of the child and make appropriate responses about them. Appropriate here means displaying sensitivity to the child’s own mental state (Meins et al., 2012). An example from Meins et al. (op. cit., p. 395) shows two opposing styles of caregiver response to the same behaviour by the child. The incident is where the caregiver withdraws a toy after the child calmly turned away when offered it. Appropriate responses displaying mind-mindedness would be attributing to the child simple lack of desire for the toy and she might say so to the child. However if the caregiver attributed to the child the mental state that the child didn’t like her and made a response on that basis then that would be seen as a non-attuned response and inappropriate mind-mindedness.
Looking at these three characteristics I would see the first and third as complementing each other, with the first being a general skill of engagement with the child where the child is assimilated into the intimate and two-sided role of mother-child and the third is when the caregiver is keen and skilled at reading the child’s intentions, feelings and thoughts. Scaffolding is knowing when and what support to provide to help the child. So have we found the recipe for success for super-mums? 5 Certainly there is evidence now that good parenting can be described and that there is more to it than a mysterious rapport that some people find with their children or, at the other extreme cla
iming that it just consists of a set of behavioral principles that must be adhered to. But parenting in the literature described here needs to be carefully implemented. Given the notorious lack of support some young mums receive in the ways of how to parent and the possibility described above of improving the child’s executive functioning then surely the early intervention agenda needs to include these recent findings.
Children’s Understanding of Advertising
This has been a central area of research in the field of children and their relationship with the commercial world and will continue to be so as long as the promotion of goods and services to certain audiences is seen as a problematic but legitimate activity. However twenty-first century promotion with its ability to utilise digital media means that we have to revisit and evaluate again the original findings in this area as they were mostly based on evidence obtained from television advertising , a medium that basically was, and now is to a lesser extent non-interactive and broadcast in a similar form to large audiences. I have already introduced the idea of images of childhood as a section in Chapter 2 and suggested that this slippery concept of the child produces an interesting dynamic when placed in the commercial world (Buckingham, 2009, 2011) but what about advertising? We need to look at this and analyse what it is trying to do in order to see how children at different ages consume it.
Advertising, Marketing and Promotion
I’ll start with some definitions of the first two and leave discussing what exactly ‘promotion’ entails until later. Advertising is “…any paid message that a firm delivers to consumers in order to make its offer more attractive to them” (Tellis, 2004, p. 9). Now that’s simple and identifies advertising as a communicative form within a commercial, trading nexus with terms referring to money and organised commercial activity (the ‘firm’). What do they do? Advertising enhances their offers to consumers. That is its general function and includes activities that improve brand value or brand equity rather than mentioning words like ‘persuasion’ or changing consumer behaviour although that is implicit in the transformation to an attractive proposition for the consumer. It potentially involves all stages in the consumption cycle and various parts of the consumer’s ecology from billboards on the right and left to skywriting and plane livery above and on the pavements below in cities. The definition of marketing is more sonorous and measured as befits the organisation that created it, the American Marketing Association. Here it is as approved by its Board of Directors in July 2013: “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large” (AMA, 2017). Note the list of four stakeholders including a nod in the direction of ‘society’, and the three levels of production of ‘offerings of value’, transmitted in four stages. It’s balanced and succinct and frames the activity as involving and integral to most things including intangible concepts and ideas that can be subject to the process of exchange in transactions in culture and society.
So we need to do justice to advertising in our exploration of just what children are exposed to or immersed in or trying to make sense of. 6 One exercise which I explored when I was looking at how we could work with children to advance their understanding of advertising involved setting up properties of the concept of ‘advertising’ and then using these to see if the child could give examples of other kinds of media which also had these properties. Because advertising is multifunctional and has different jobs to do, it’s necessary to elaborate these in order to distil what the essential characteristics of advertising are. Although nothing much came out of the exercise, I did keep these examples of similar media and that provided a basis to develop an analysis of ‘advertising’. There may be ones I’ve neglected but here they are with the ‘other media examples’ in brackets:Advertising is entertaining—it’s fun (Advertising is not alone here. The Simpsons is fun for most children and much of kids TV is designed to entertain)
Advertising gets your attention (There are many ways to grab your attention, such as telling ghost stories or listening to a good teacher)
Advertising gives me information—it tells me things (So does Wikipedia online or instructions how to make paper cut-outs)
Advertising is about goods (buying stuff) and services, like holidays (Holiday programmes on TV are like this)
Advertising promotes things. It tells you the good things, the positive bits. Never the negative side. (People are like that when they show off or try and impress teachers)
Advertising is rhetorical (Advertising uses visual and verbal rhetoric in order to communicate propositions about brands. Lawyers and poets use rhetoric too, to achieve different ends. Lawyers persuade—poets inspire). [For use with older children]
These six functions are all shared by more than just advertising and the next stage is to make sense of these statements and integrate them into a model of advertising. The six functions (entertaining, attention-grabbing, informative, goods/services content, promotional, and rhetorical) are not present in all advertising and we need another way of getting the essence of advertising as a simple conjunction 7 of all these six sets will exclude much advertising.
One way is to appeal to what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called ‘family resemblances ’ (Wittgenstein, 1958). However a closer examination of this fragment where he describes his famous term suggests that the philosopher has posed a psychological problem. He argued that if we look at the concept of ‘game’ we start to compare and contrast one with another and as soon we put some together and look for similarities, counter-examples occur. There’s a complicated network of similarities and some are very general and some are quite specific using detailed differences. This is a psychological statement about how people go about establishing similarity and difference as they can use different levels of analysis from the general to the highly particular and in this game you can do that. Natural concepts are embedded in many different networks. It is to this intricate network of similarity that he ascribes the name ‘family resemblances’ and concludes that the ‘game’ is indeed a family in that sense as members of the same family tend to resemble each other in various features of the human being. Now to me this is an attempt to make sense of an intuition that any comparison can be related to another game or occasion of compare and contrast and there is a pattern there that goes in and out of focus as one strives to make sense. But the evidence of a pattern is enough to justify the label family. Advertising is like this where as one sifts through the different examples you think you see relationships but counter-examples make it less certain.
The Literature on Advertising to Children
The six functions of advertising mentioned above should emerge as part of advertising at different ages or stages in the development of the child. These functions together with their extensions (the part in brackets that doesn’t refer to advertising but to other contexts where that communicative function can appear) will be referred to as we go through the literature.
The early literature pre-1990 is covered in detail in Young (1990) and I’ll summarise it briefly first, citing papers that I think made a significant contribution to research in this area. References are kept to a minimum and can be found in Young (1990). Work done up to 2012 is reviewed in Young (2013).
The first papers in the early 1970s used interviews with children and measured the child’s understanding of TV commercials using three levels of understanding; low, medium, and high. Not surprisingly older children demonstrated a better understanding than young ones and the general consensus was that a high understanding of advertising emerged about 7–8 years of age. However the ability to spontaneously produce a reply that is coded as high understanding to a researcher is confounded with the capability the child might possess to understand advertising from an earlier age as young children can be shy and unsure at the best of times in any assessment situation. So non-verbal techniques like pointing to one of several dif
ferent pictures that were supposed to represent different things advertisers want you to do were tried to no avail. Young children would know that there is an association between pictures of children watching advertising on TV and children shopping with mum as part of their skills of dealing with the brand in different contexts and this emerges well before they would be able to understand that advertising has a commercial intent.
There were several papers that did tackle theoretical issues and by 1990 various strands of what I have called advertising literacy (Young, 1986) had been discussed. Robertson and Rossiter (1974) identified being able to separate commercials from programme; recognising some sort of sponsor as the source of the commercial message and being aware that there would be an intended audience for the message; understanding the symbolic nature of the representation of the product, character and contextual representation in commercials; and an ability to discriminate, by example, between products as advertised and products as experienced as all essential for any understanding of advertising. Roberts (1982) put forward the idea that adults can only be said to truly understand advertising if certain requirements are fulfilled. One would be that the source of the advertising is an interested communicator (as opposed to disinterested) (May , 1981) and can persuade and be biased and send biased messages. These require different interpretative strategies to be deployed thus implying the recipient is capable of organising these metacognitive processes . With the benefit of hindsight I can see that Roberts was arguing that an adult understanding of advertising was not just a matter of decoding but being able to manage the process and that both these suites of skills, executive and comprehension-related are necessary. Faber , Perloff, and Hawkins (1982) found that children’s understanding of advertising was related to role-taking ability —again another social cognitive skill to add to the mix.