How Marketers Target Kids
Kids represent an important demographic to marketers because they have their own purchasing power, they influence their parents' buying decisions and they're the adult consumers of the future.
Industry spending on advertising to children has exploded in the past decade, increasing from a mere $100 million in 1990 to more than $2 billion in 2000.
Parents today are willing to buy more for their kids because trends such as smaller family size, dual incomes and postponing children until later in life mean that families have more disposable income. As well, guilt can play a role in spending decisions as time-stressed parents substitute material goods for time spent with their kids.
Here are some of the strategies marketers employ to target children and teens:
Pester Power
| "We're relying on the kid to pester the mom to buy the product, rather than going straight to the mom." Barbara A. Martino, Advertising Executive |
Buzz or street marketing
The challenge for marketers is to cut through the intense advertising clutter in young people's lives. Many companies are using "buzz marketing"—a new twist on the tried-and-true "word of mouth" method. The idea is to find the coolest kids in a community and have them use or wear your product in order to create a buzz around it. Buzz, or "street marketing," as it's also called, can help a company to successfully connect with the savvy and elusive teen market by using trendsetters to give their products "cool" status.
Buzz marketing is particularly well-suited to the Internet, where young "Net promoters" use newsgroups, chat rooms and blogs to spread the word about music, clothes and other products among unsuspecting users.
Commercialization in education
School used to be a place where children were protected from the advertising and consumer messages that permeated their world—but not any more. Budget shortfalls are forcing school boards to allow corporations access to students in exchange for badly needed cash, computers and educational materials.
Corporations realize the power of the school environment for promoting their name and products. A school setting delivers a captive youth audience and implies the endorsement of teachers and the educational system. Marketers are eagerly exploiting this medium in a number of ways, including:
- Sponsored educational materials: for example, a Kraft "healthy eating" kit to teach about Canada's Food Guide (using Kraft products); or forestry company Canfor's primary lesson plans that make its business focus seem like environmental management rather than logging.
- Supplying schools with technology in exchange for high company visibility.
- Exclusive deals with fast food or soft drink companies to offer their products in a school or district.
- Advertising posted in classrooms, school buses, on computers, etc. in exchange for funds.
- Contests and incentive programs: for example, the Pizza Hut reading incentives program in which children receive certificates for free pizza if they achieve a monthly reading goal; or Campbell's Labels for Education project, in which Campbell provides educational resources for schools in exchange for soup labels collected by students.
- Sponsoring school events: The Canadian company ShowBiz brings moveable video dance parties into schools to showcase various sponsors' products.
The Internet is an extremely desirable medium for marketers wanting to target children:
- It's part of youth culture. This generation of young people is growing up with the Internet as a daily and routine part of their lives.
- Parents generally do not understand the extent to which kids are being marketed to online.
- Kids are often online alone, without parental supervision.
- Unlike broadcasting media, which have codes regarding advertising to kids, the Internet is unregulated.
- Sophisticated technologies make it easy to collect information from young people for marketing research, and to target individual children with personalized advertising.
- By creating engaging, interactive environments based on products and brand names, companies can build brand loyalties from an early age.
Children are often aware of and want to see entertainment meant for older audiences because it is actively marketed to them. In a report released in 2000, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) revealed how the movie, music and video games industries routinely market violent entertainment to young children.
The FTC studied 44 films rated "Restricted," and discovered that 80 per cent were targeted to children under 17. Marketing plans included TV commercials run during hours when young viewers were most likely to be watching. One studio's plan for a violent R-rated film stated, "Our goal was to find the elusive teen target audience, and make sure that everyone between the ages of 12 and 18 was exposed to the film."Music containing "explicit-content" labels were targeted at young people through extensive advertising in the most popular teen venues on television, and radio, in print, and online.
Of the video game companies investigated for the report, 70 per cent regularly marketed Mature rated games (for 17 years and older) to children. Marketing plans included placing advertising in media that would reach a substantial percentage of children under 17.
The FTC report also highlighted the fact that toys based on characters from mature entertainment are often marketed to young children. Mature and Teen rated video games are advertised in youth magazines; and toys based on Restricted movies and M-rated video games are marketed to children as young as four.
SOURCE: http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/parents/marketing/marketers_target_kids.cfm
my oppinion:
This article could be helpful in making a marketing campaign adressed to kids. I think the tips, they gave us are important and we can use them in our campaign. We can chose one of mentioned marketing strategies and build on it our own way to advertise the product. Now we're having more informations, more facts and we can make more actions to promote the M&M's.
I have known that kids have really big influence to their parents and makieng them our target group is a very good choise. Also the other kids could be helpful in building the brand, because if they are popular and liked, they can be some kind of trendsetters and promote our product among their friends. I didn't realise that young people are so big group and they're watching tv, going to schools, surfing to the Net and we have a lot of occasions to make them know about our product and encourage them to buy.
In fact all informations in this article are improtant and useful for us. For example now i know how big tool in marketing is the Internet. Most of kids have accounts in sites like Facebook or our national nasza-klasa. Adverts up there, games and promotions for 'fans' are a good way to interest them.
I didn't knew how many opportunities it gives us and we have so many occasions to reach to our little customers. We can also use the school and make out there some little promotion by sponsoring events for example. We can produce the notebooks, pens and other accesories to promote M&M's. Promotion on the streets is another way to get a new customers. For example – in Poland we have two most recognizable characters from emited tv spot. We can make a fancy dress copied in them and make a photographies with kids and give them for free. We won't be forgot and propably kids is gonna like to have contact with 'alive' character, which they can touch and talk to.
This article is giving us the fundamental knowledge about using marketing strategies in promotion our product. Kids could be very difficult target group, but if we reach to them they became a really strong group of customers. Sometimes we don't realise how many opportunities we have. After reading this text, we starting to know how imprortant are different ways of marketing.
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