Looks at the way corporations and advertisers target children as a profitable demographic, as well as their methods for getting past parental safeguards to make products of all kinds appeal directly to even the youngest children.
If you're in the business of marketing or developing products and programs for kids, What Kids Buy and Why belongs in your office. How can you create outstanding products and programs that will win in the marketplace and in the hearts of kids and parents? Dan S. Acuff and Robert H. Reiher have invented a development and marketing process called Youth Market Systems that puts the needs, abilities, and interests of kids first. This system makes sure you won't miss the mark whether you're trying to reach young children or teens, boys or girls, or whether you're selling toys, sports equipment, snacks, school supplies, or software. Based on the latest child development research, What Kids Buy and Why is chock-full of provocative information about the cognitive, emotional, and social needs of each age group. This book tells you among other things--why 3-through-7-year-olds love things that transform, why 8-through-12-year-olds love to collect stuff, how the play patterns of boys and girls differ, and why kids of all ages love slapstick.What Kids Buy and Why is the result of Acuff and Reiher's almost twenty years of consulting with high-profile clients including Johnson & Johnson, Nike, Microsoft, Nestle, Tyco, Disney, Pepsi, Warner Brothers, LucasFilm, Amblin/Spielberg, Mattel, Hasbro, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Quaker Oats, General Mills, Broderbund, Bandai, Sega, ABC, CBS, I-HOP, Domino's, Hardee's, and Kellogg's. Special features include: an innovative matrix for speedy, accurate product analysis and program development a clear, step-by-step process for making decisions that increase your product's appeal to kids tools and techniques for creating characters that kids love Here is the complete one-stop tool for understanding what children of all ages want to buy.
This companion presents the newest research in this important area, showcasing the huge diversity in children’s relationships with digital media around the globe, and exploring the benefits, challenges, history, and emerging developments in the field. Children are finding novel ways to express their passions and priorities through innovative uses of digital communication tools. This collection investigates and critiques the dynamism of children's lives online with contributions fielding both global and hyper-local issues, and bridging the wide spectrum of connected media created for and by children. From education to children's rights to cyberbullying and youth in challenging circumstances, the interdisciplinary approach ensures a careful, nuanced, multi-dimensional exploration of children’s relationships with digital media. Featuring a highly international range of case studies, perspectives, and socio-cultural contexts, The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children is the perfect reference tool for students and researchers of media and communication, family and technology studies, psychology, education, anthropology, and sociology, as well as interested teachers, policy makers, and parents.
While everyone was bemoaning their alleged laziness and self-absorption, the Millennial generation quietly grew up. Pragmatic, diverse, and digitally native, this massive cohort of 80 million are now entering their prime consumer years, having children of their own, and shifting priorities as they move solidly into adulthood. Millennials with Kids changes how we think about this new generation of parents and uncovers profound insights for marketers and brand strategists seeking to earn their loyalty. Building on the highly acclaimed Marketing to Millennials, this book captures data from a new large-scale generational study and reveals how to: Enlist Millennial parents as co-creators of brands and products * Promote purpose beyond the bottom line * Cultivate shareability * Democratize customer experience * Integrate technology * Develop content-driven campaigns that speak to Millennials * And more A gold mine of demographic profiles, interviews, and examples of brand successes and failures, this book helps marketers rethink the typical American household-and connect with these critical consumers in the complex participation economy.
Examining a wide range of successful campaigns for food, clothes, toys, and entertainment for children, Fishel provides unique insights into what makes for successful marketing from both the professional view of a designer and from the expert perspective of a kid. 200 color images.
"What corporations fear most are consumers who ask questions. Naomi Klein offers us the arguments with which to take on the superbrands." Billy Bragg from the bookjacket.
Ads aimed at kids are virtually everywhere -- in classrooms and textbooks, on the Internet, even at slumber parties and the playground. Product placement and other innovations have introduced more subtle advertising to movies and television. Companies are enlisting children as guerrilla marketers, targeting their friends and families. Even trusted social institutions such as the Girl Scouts are teaming up with marketers. Drawing on her own survey research and unprecedented access to the advertising industry, New York Times bestselling author and leading cultural and economic authority Juliet Schor examines how a marketing effort of vast size, scope, and effectiveness has created "commercialized children." Schor, author of The Overworked American and The Overspent American, looks at the broad implications of this strategy. Sophisticated advertising strategies convince kids that products are necessary to their social survival. Ads affect not just what they want to buy, but who they think they are and how they feel about themselves. Based on long-term analysis, Schor reverses the conventional notion of causality: it's not just that problem kids become overly involved in the values of consumerism; it's that kids who are overly involved in the values of consumerism become problem kids. In this revelatory and crucial book, Schor also provides guidelines for parents and teachers. What is at stake is the emotional and social well-being of our children. Like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia, and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Born to Buy is a major contribution to our understanding of a contemporary trend and its effects on the culture.
In The Case for Make Believe, Harvard child psychologist Susan Linn tells the alarming story of childhood under siege in a commercialized and technology-saturated world. Although play is essential to human development and children are born with an innate capacity for make believe, Linn argues that, in modern-day America, nurturing creative play is not only countercultural—it threatens corporate profits. A book with immediate relevance for parents and educators alike, The Case for Make Believe helps readers understand how crucial child's play is—and what parents and educators can do to protect it. At the heart of the book are stories of children at home, in school, and at a therapist's office playing about real-life issues from entering kindergarten to a sibling's death, expressing feelings they can't express directly, and making meaning of an often confusing world. In an era when toys come from television and media companies sell videos as brain-builders for babies, Linn lays out the inextricable links between play, creativity, and health, showing us how and why to preserve the space for make believe that children need to lead fulfilling and meaningful lives.
It discusses the use of resources, pollution, and the distortions created in the economies of both wealthy industrialized nations and Third World countries.