Marketing To Children

Marketing and advertising is a ubiquitous stimulus on many youngsters accompanied by parents as well. Parents are having a tough period trying to raise their kids the way they want but kids, the captive audience are continually being swayed progressively more and more through media and advertisements. Similarly, marketing to children has become a public pandemic due to several explanations. Calvert (2008) addresses product marketing to children and shows that although marketers have targeted children for decades, two recent trends have increased their interest in child consumers. (p.205). The binary of those latest trends are, children’s discretionary income and their control to sway their parents consumptions and the increasing number of

little technical advancements that kids now a day’s interact with from the start as infants throughout childhood , in so doing, creating a growing media space for children and their products. This paper will be reconnoitring advertising in the types of related media, such as the visual and educational media influences and the diverse affected health-related concerns as well as the various ways of diminishing commercialization of children. On the side, as a result of being a firm advocate against marketing to children, this paper is also going to share a discourse about the reason why marketing to children is a social problem.
ADVERTISING IN DIFFERENT MEDIA
There used to be a point in time where kids used to like to fonder outside to play with their friends and interact outside the environment, but as technological advancements innovating every second, so are the brains of our young minds. Children are now marketed to in unprecedented ways-through brand licensing, product placement, viral marketing, via schools, DVDs, video games, the internet, cell phones- so that there’s a brand in front of a child’s face virtually every moment of every day (Barbaro & Earp 2008). Subsequently, most would think that it is the parents that are the ones that are to be blamed that their own kids are being marketed as a social problem but that is not the case. Kids spend more hours at their own school with their friends than essentially at home, when their parents have full power overseeing on what their children are doing. In the process of trying to push the social meaning of products, marketers have also begun to push a specific set of highly materialistic values about what it means to be “cool” (Barbaro & Earp 2008). Children are influenced significantly at school, from the point where they see former kids wearing or carrying around the “hottest”branded products till the point they itch to have it too, consecutively just to fit in with everyone else at school. Whether doubt it was the latest toy, game, or even the packaging of food products with their much-beloved cartoon character labelled onto it. They automatically judge it’s the greatest thing ever and get their parents to buy it. (Calvert 2008) “Youths also shape the buying patterns of their families. “From vacation choices to car purchases to meal selections, they exert a tremendous power over the family pocketbook” (p.207). A new modernistic marketing approach have led to online advertising and to be what is now called “stealth marketing” which is a method of embedding products in the shows and movies viewers watch. As children, little do they know yet become conscious on how the consumer market exploits the young by taking advantage of them through conditioning and shaping the young child’s mind with brands.
HEALTH-RELATED CONCERNS
The child’s cognitive growth is constrained suitable to the quantity of advertisement they come across, tempting them to desire, what is promoted. It’s essential that children are able to grow a healthy lifestyle by exploring on their own, but as long marketers keep bombarding children’s visual concept with branding and shaping a young growing mind, just limits the factor of their creativity. Age ‘compression has become so extreme that marketers have begun explicitly targeting babies virtually from birth, so that children as young as six months of age can now recognize brands (Barbaro & Earp 2008). Youth marketer, Robert Reiher states, “The single most important thing is the bond that occurs between others known as the social dynamic because that bond and trust that is created is between mother and child is the foundation for all higher learning later. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to sacrifice that time with watching Baby Einstein and missing a huge understanding of a child’s development (Barbaro & Earp 2008). Creative play, the pedestal of knowledge, decisive judgment, being analytical, understanding and a way that kids make life consequential is exceedingly important to the cognitive development of a child but has been reducing after the vast amount of advertisement that children are exposed to. Researchers say hours spent in front of the TV only trains the brain to watch more TV, a child leaned on bright colours and rapidly changing images will find it tough to focus on a teacher (Barbaro & Earp 2008). There is little to no credible scientific evidence that educational DVDs, such as “Baby Einstein” or “Brainy Baby,” actually teach children anything of value, or enrich their ability to learn (Barbaro & Earp 2008). Even so, the cognitive development of a child and creative play is restrained owing to the commercial media that kids are relentlessly exposed to which is unmistakably detrimental and heart-rending. ‘
When children are constantly being exposed to various advertisements, as Dr.Kanner said, they will feel inferior if they do not have the latest products. With this mentality, young children will grow up being self-centered and vain. There is a specific type of advertisement that is being used to lure children called symbolic advertisement, where the product is based on a social meaning (Barbaro & Earp 2008). With this type of advertisement, kids are being taught to and are keener towards eating junk foods or whatever foods that labels something that the marketers have portrayed in these simple-minded children brains. Over the last two decades, obesity rates have doubled in children and tripled in teenagers, and the life expectancy of kids is now shorter than that of their parents- the first such decline in modern times (Barbaro & Earp 2008). “This generation of children is the heaviest it has ever been. 16% children and teenagers are overweight. Obesity is closely linked to the conflict theory, which states that health and illness is a result of inequitable and oppressive economic conditions” (Tepperman & Curtis, 2011, p.231). Therefore, advertising to children should be narrowed to some degree as for the sake of their own health and the sake of our future.
OUR FUTURE
Immediate order to prevent consumer marketing to children should be started at schools as commercial free zones, as well as children television commercial free zones, and the government must be extra conscious on how marketers are subjecting against kids.

When it comes to protecting kids from aggressive child marketing practices, the U.S. lags far behind other industrialized countries (Barbaro & Earp 2008). The government has made laws for the safety of children including, seat belt laws, helmet laws and tobacco marketing laws, but they have not yet made action to filter the advertising of other products and services to children (Barbaro & Earp 2008). In order to prevent consumer marketing to children, it is the duty of parents, family members and teacher to advise children and tell them that it is okay to have and want nice things, but to not mistake that greediness with happiness and satisfaction (Barbaro & Earp 2008). In today’s society there is no more to a child to aspire to be a firefighter when they grow up or anything else that some time ago used to be popular. The “new cool” is to grow up and be rich to the majority of kids today. Their psyche has changed and now children only look to wanting to become rich and successful fast (Barbaro & Earp 2008), in order to fulfill that want they endeavour and long

for.
Marketing to children as you can see is a social problem from the preliminary developmental stages of an infant and continually throughout the years the ages of adolescences, and so the cycle repeats as generations pass by and each of those generations gradually slowly get conditioned to the stimulus of marketing. It affects the values and creativity of youngsters, children’s early cognitive development along child with obesity in addition to the overall future of our growing society. The government must immediately regulate and rectify against what sly marketers are doing to children as a social problem is all societies.