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Target market: children as consumers

What do you call a consumer who wants to buy everything you have, doesn't care what it costs and is less than five feet tall? A marketer's dream? Nope. Youcall them kids. -- AdRelevance Intelligence Report, 2000
Children are bombarded by brand messages almost from birth, including counting books for preschoolers that use M&Ms or Cheerios, exposure tobrightly coloured and appealing branded packaging in the supermarket, movie and toy tie-ins in fast-food restaurants, product placement in movies, advertisements on television and the Internet, andpitches from entertainment and sports stars in a range of media.
In fact, it is almost impossible to escape marketing messages. No wonder, then, that children as young as two are starting to recognizelogos and request specific brands as soon as they begin to speak.
Children are a prime target for marketers. Not only do children today have more disposable income at younger ages, but they havesignificant influence over family purchases. YTV's 2002 Tween Report estimated that Canadian children aged 9 to 14 spend $1.9 billion and influence $20 billion in family purchases per year. Marketingexperts call it "pester power," or the "nag factor" -- the ability to get kids to nag their parents to buy a specific product or take them to a specific restaurant. After all, if your child asks you forthe latest toy 37 times a day for a week, the odds are that you will eventually give in and buy it.
As a result, there is now a whole segment of the marketing industry devoted to figuring out how tosell things to kids. Children were first identified as a target market in the 1960s, and the concept has continued to increase in popularity, as shown by the recent explosion of books with titleslike What Kids Buy and Why: The Psychology of Marketing to Kids; BrandChild: Remarkable Insights into the Minds of Today's Global Kids and Their Relationships with Brands; and Kidfluence: The Marketer's...