Marketing and advertising have a great impact on decision-making and consumers’ choice. Children (despite their age and knowledge level) are the main target audience for many marketers selling food and toys products. Children audience is easy to manipulate and create a certain image of the product, create demand and manipulate the needs of small consumers. Some critics suppose that marketing towards children can be ethical as it serves their needs and benefits society, but it is not true because decisions and choices made by children are spontaneous and impulsive based on immediate desires rather than an actual need. Marketing towards children is unethical because all the buying decisions accepted by small consumers are unconscious and deprived of a rational base.
Marketing towards children is unethical in all cases because children are unable to accept decisions and evaluate all pros and cons of the products proposed. In many cases, a decision to buy something is based on their natural desire to explore the world around them and try something new. A three-four-year-old kid cannot decide what type of food they need and evaluate its caloricity level. Most of the foods advertised to children are for highly sugared products, such as presweetened cereals, cakes, candy, and cookies; few commercials advertise nutritious foods. Commercials for toys used “live” action scenes to demonstrate how the toy worked or what you could do with it; commercials for food, on the other hand, were animated or had an animated figure talking to real children. Commercials geared for the very youngest are kept simple with a clear contrast between the foreground and background. As children get older, the messages get more complex and may tell imaginative and complex stories, often using elements of fantasy. Most commercials geared toward children emphasize having fun — the product is fun to eat, fun to do, fun to wear. Children’s commercials are also likely to employ stereotypes and have very specific formal attributes.
Children’s understanding of commercials is a particularly salient issue. Research in this area has focused upon two areas:
- whether children can differentiate between programs and commercials;
- whether children understand the selling intent of commercials.
A considerable portion of this research is based on a cognitive model and concerned with ascertaining ways to make children more critical consumers. Children’s ability to distinguish between commercials and programs has serious policy implications. Studies also found that, as children got older, they could make more complex distinctions; for example, programs entertain while commercials try to sell. In addition, children as young as three and four could differentiate between programs and commercials, especially child-oriented commercials. Commercials may also lead to a lot of disappointed and unhappy children. Few commercials give any information about the price of the product, what it is made out of, or how well it will perform. In many cases, children may be misled about what a toy actually can and cannot do and are disappointed when they get the toy and try to play with it. Finally, most children are disappointed, at one time or another, in the gifts they receive. Research has shown that such disappointment may be more prevalent among those children who watch more television. For example, children who were heavy television viewers were more likely to be disappointed after Christmas when they did not get all the things they had asked Santa to bring them. Toy commercials are especially prevalent before Christmas, often comprising more than half of all commercials directed at children during these months.
While dietary goals have consistently recommended a reduction in the consumption of refined and other processed sugars, most food commercials directed at children promote the use of such sugars. Finally, children’s commercials, like those for adults, do more than sell products. They also sell a lifestyle and contain some subtle and other not so subtle social messages. For example, commercials geared to children usually have a voice-over format and the authority figure, in nine out of ten commercials, is a male. When the voice-over is a female, the product is often more “feminine,” for example, food, a doll, and so on. The spokespersons in commercials are also most likely to be adults and white. Children’s commercials also contain a considerable amount of aggression as well as antisocial behaviours. A minute of commercials contained three times as much aggression, often involving nonhuman characters, as a minute of children’s programming. They also found that the only frequently appearing antisocial behaviour was sharing and helping (altruism), most often in public service announcements and noncereal commercials. Antisocial behaviours are found in (sharing, affection, courtesy) commercials for Barbie, Care Bears, and McDonald’s.
Marketing and advertising directed at children are unethical because it is based on unconscious decision-making and lack of knowledge about the world. These commercials stress having fun — how much fun a toy is to play with, how much fun a snack or cereal is to eat. Commercials rarely provide information about cost or durability. The commercials also have a variety of effects. First, they help sell these products and create a market for specific products. Second, they have a lot of unintended or secondary consequences, such as increasing parent-child conflict, unhappiness, and materialism. Advertising to children is profitable for businesses as well as the television industry. While common sense suggests that advertising raises prices, industry spokespersons have consistently argued that advertising to children typically reduces rather than raises prices for toys, candies, snacks, and cereals.