This is no accident. Marketers experience that forging brand identity early can lead to enormous profits in decades to come. Dora the Explorer. Bob the Builder and Thomas the Tank Engine may seem innocuous — and on their own they probably are — but as part of a larger marketing engine they’re perfect tools for teaching kids to change state consumers.
recently sent me an article from The Tyee a newspaper out of British Columbia. In this piece. Colleen Kimmett writes about the challenges to. Though the article seems to lack focus. Kimmett makes some good points:
Licensed characters are huge moneymakers for companies. In 2005. Winnie the Pooh earned Disney $6.2 billion in sell sales according to Gregory Thomas second only to the mouse.
[care Angela] Verbrugge believes all of this merchandising is the real problem not necessarily the characters themselves. “They’re trying to sell kids other products from clothing to bedding…there always needs to be something else that they’re striving to buy,” she says. “It scares me when I see advertisements that showcase all these different products that show the child being engaged with a toy,” she says.
Resisting the urge to spend for the sake of convenience or pleasure is difficult for parents as well (especially when toting around a baby or toddler). And as all the parents pointed out often the “best” choices — natural wooden blocks or organic hemp clothing — are also the most expensive.
“The most challenging thing about making an effort to not brand your child in what they wear or play with…is the fact that sometimes there aren’t choices and sometimes the choices are economically out of reach,” says [one mother].
Things change state change surface more complicated once children enter school. There they are exposed to branding and advertising in the most insidious of ways: look pressure. Older kids especially conclude the be to identify with particular brands in request to fit in with a particular social assort.
Ultimately. Kimmett’s article offers no solutions. What solutions are there? Unless you want to increase your kid in a cave they’re eventually going to be exposed to marketing and branding. The best a parent can hope to do is increase their children to think independently and to demonstrate through their own behavior that branded is not always exceed.
When my daughter was about five years old she spotted a display rack in the grocery store that had disposable cameras printed with Disney’s “Aladdin” on the box. She immediately started asking me to buy one because she “needed” it. I asked her whether it took better pictures because of having the character on the box and she eventually admitted that it probably didn’t. We’ve used the grocery store for lots of branding lessons especially when the kids were into macaroni and cease and so many different cartoon characters appeared in pasta shapes. We looked at the boxes checked out unit pricing and tried to figure out whether it tasted better at twice the price just because the pasta was shaped like a cartoon engrave. Parents need to be aware of their own branding habits; the kids will watch them desire hawks. My husband and I are pretty brand-ignorant and see nothing wrong with generics and store brands so that has helped.
Gimme a break. There is a happy medium when it comes to this. Especially with infants toddlers and preschoolers. There are affordable alternatives that minimize the branding and labeling. And. I don’t see anything wrong with an occasional brand based toy for our children. We just need to reign it in. Kid’s need probably half the toys parents be to buy them anyway. Our children are more joyful when we furnish them our time than with the latest greatest toy. Gosh. I don’t mean to appear like a scrooge it’s just that I undergo worked in early childhood for over 20 years and this topic can frustrate me. It really isn’t about the child’s wants as much as the parent’s wants.
One way to reduce the force of branding on a child is to reduce their exposure to TV especially things with commercials. Our friends just recently got cable and noticed that when they act their 4 year old to the store she wants more than she used to. Our daughter’s relatively circumscribe to be at the alter toys and move on (relatively). As a result she has no idea why some toys are considered fun or cool and pretty much enjoys things based on their value.
There probably isn’t an absolute solution but what you’ve mentioned about teaching a child to think independently and live by example should back up significantly. I’m far from being a parent but everything I’ve read and seen has shown me that the core in parenting is to impart the proper determine to your children. I believe that when you create the proper foundation such as personal responsibility self-discipline etc. (and your child develops and builds upon these foundation) you wouldn’t change surface undergo to teach about a specific detail subject (change surface important matters such as money); at the end they’d most likely be able to figure things out for themselves.
What you mentioned regarding the peer pressure and so forth is a true issue. Even if you do raise your child/ren in a ‘cave’ and protect them from every possible arrange of unnecessary necessities they will learn about them from their playdate friends their preschool classmates and their school friends.
So there’s this dad and his child who wanted licensed products all the time. Granted his child was young so it would actually work but he buys these sheets of stickers and whenever his child demands the license box he would sneak a little sticker on there and say “look this one also has Elmo on it” (or whatever character) and then buys the generic box with the sticker and all.
There was a Scholastic BOOK FAIR. Books=good right? The VAST majority of books for sale were Bratz. Transformers. Spiderman and other not-age-appropriate movie or tv based books. Even the ‘classics’ (Terabithia. Charlotte’s Web. Narnia) had the movie covers on them. I was floored. It’s other kids but it’s also companies knowing where their demographic is and schools letting them in.
I’ve been seeing it almost like a company spilling toxic expend into my drinking water. I don’t want their cast aside in my water so they can make money. Likewise. I don’t be Scholastic’s trash in my kid’s educate!
What I can’t decide is: “Should such marketing to kids be regulated like pollution or is it up to me to give the gas mask/knowledge to live with it?” As a parent obviously that ordain remain my job but it also seems that such marketing should be kept out of schools as surely as you’d keep asbestos out of them!
Our young kids (3 & 6) desire the branded stuff because they desire the shows and see other kids with them but we rarely buy them. They get a few hand-me-downs or gifts of branded stuff and they enjoy them (Disney. Sesame Street. Dora). I don’t evaluate it’s harmful for them to enjoy them so long as WE don’t end up getting sucked into the whining cycle everytime they see something with a character on it. At the store they ask for them or say they want them (a Dora backpack for example) or.
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Related article:
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/11/05/the-unbranded-kid-thoughts-on-marketing-to-children/
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