Consumer Kids: How big business is grooming our children for profit [Paperback]

The targeting of children for commercial purposes, using as they do all the seductive wizardry of modern technology, creates shoppers instead of citizens, and has become a rampant contagion, an abuse that corrodes a child's liberty of thought and being and erodes individuality and humanity. As a tool of propaganda and indoctrination such commercial pressure on the young is effective and powerful because it is insidious. Many of us have felt this to be true for a long time. Here is a vitally important book that proves the case conclusively. Every MP should read it, every minister, every family. --Michael Morpurgo

Anyone concerned with children should read this book. It is fascinating and disturbing at the same time. --Chris Kelly, Chair of NSPCC

Most parents would be shocked by the scale and sophistication of today's marketing to children. This is a landmark book, full of ideas and solutions for reclaiming childhood for children. --Oliver James

The first book to expose just how our kids are targeted as consumers and why it matters for us all.

This book will shock you. Consumer Kids shows how, more than ever before, and perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, our children are being tracked and targeted by big business, which sells them back their dreams, packages their childhood and exploits their vulnerabilities. It looks at why children torture their Barbies, how boys feel about David Beckham, why mums are cooler than dads, why children in the toughest families make the most ardent consumers and why, above all, too much marketing makes you unhappy. This hard-hitting exposé is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the deeper implications of the runaway commercial world we live in.

Ed Mayo is a leading campaigner and commentator on social and economic issues and is Chief Executive of Consumer Focus. Ed has written widely, including research on children as consumers that has been described by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian as ‘a groundbreaking study’. Ed helped to found the Fairtrade brand and was the strategist behind the world’s most successful anti-poverty campaign, Jubilee 2000. The Guardian nominated him as one of the top 100 most influential social innovators and he is a World Economics Forum ‘Young Global Leader’. Ed is married with three children and lives in South East London. Agnes Nairn is an academic researcher, writer, speaker and consultant. She is Professor of Marketing at two of Europe’s leading business schools, EM-Lyon Business School in France and RSM Erasmus University in the Netherlands. Agnes’s academic research has been published in a wide range of international journals and her policy-related work includes the first study of the links between media exposure, materialism and self-esteem in UK children. She has also written on Barbie torture, how children use David Beckham to understand moral values, covert marketing techniques on the internet and how neuroscience throws new light on how children relate to advertising. She is on the government panel convened by the Department of Children, Schools and Families to assess the impact of the commercial world on children. Agnes is married with two children and lives in Bath.

Introduction Who’s your child working for? Sarah is a bright and bubbly girl. She enjoys Brownies on Mondays, modern dance on Tuesdays and she’s just got a place in the elite gymnastics squad at the local Eagles club, which means training three times a week and travelling to competitions around the country. She has an easy-going nature, making her a little ‘people magnet’ – always the centre of fun and laughter at school. She goes on the computer a lot and has just started using the internet to play games and chat. Sarah also has a secret. Because she’s a busy little girl with lots of contacts in lots of places, she has been recruited through a children’s chat room site to work as a sales agent for the Barbie Girl MP3 player. It’s quite a tough job. OK, someone bought her a brand new, shiny, pink Barbie Girl MP3 player but she must be sure that it accompanies her wherever she goes: to school, to gym, to Brownies, to training sessions, to dance – everywhere. And she can’t just leave it in the locker room: she has been instructed to extol the many and various virtues of the Barbie Girl MP3 player to everyone she meets and urge them to buy one too. What’s more, she has been briefed to take copious photos of each and every one of these sales missions and mail them back to Mattel HQ. Her demanding job description also includes constructing and designing her own fan site for the MP3 player and conscripting her extended network of friends into membership. And it doesn’t stop there. Sarah has to log on to her favourite websites and blog madly about Barbie Girl and then persuade all of her mates to meet her on the Barbie Girl website so she can pepper their conversations with product recommendations. Because this is a serious contemporary employment contract she is on a payment-by-results scheme too. There are points to be collected for leaving Barbie endorsements on other sites and bonuses for producing truly convincing photographic evidence that she is selling hard, hard, hard. Sarah, by the way, is 7 years old. Hard to believe? Well, in 2007, 7 to 11-year-old girls up and down the UK were recruited by Dubit on behalf of Mattel to market the Barbie Girl MP3 player, while primary school boys of the same age were signed up to sell their Hot Wheels brand.1 Every weekend, a range of children from seven and up report back what is in and what is out to companies. The truth, widely known in the marketing world, is that children are wonderful salespeople and conduits to other children. Young people know this too. Liam, who is 16, told us quite clearly, ‘the most effective marketing to young people is by other young people’. Whether they are paid to do so or whether they advertise for free, they are like walking billboards for the brands they like, from the bag over their shoulder to the shoes on their feet or the phone in their hand. Commercial cocoon Children today are cogs in a great, spinning commercial wheel. Whilst children actually working for brands in the way Sarah is are still in a minority, all children are encouraged to want, to buy, to drink, to snack, to collect, to grow- up fast and get spending. Children are consumers and by and large they enjoy it, but some of what is on offer is problematic. The marketing that surrounds them is full of sexual promise yet they are supposed to be passive onlookers, to remain sexually naiïve. Touched-up, choreographed images, adverts and celebrities fill their world with offers of beauty and perfection and yet they are meant to be comfortable in their own skin and build their own self-esteem. In a country where nobody goes hungry, commercial life conspires to encourage a diet of sugar, salt and fat. Even when kept safe at home, for fear of risks outside, the drip-feed of entertainment on the screens of their computers and TVs is suffused with commercial, persuasive intent. Few books about childhood or family, if any, have focused on the slew of time that children now spend as consumers. This world of consumer kids is not just about shopping and advertising, but about playgrounds, streets, bedrooms, the friendships children make and the new technologies they embrace. Our story The two of us met through connections that spanned a range of countries. Agnes is an academic, who lectures, researches and consults in marketing, primarily in Britainthe UK, France and the Netherlands. Ed is a campaigner, with a track record in marketing for the public good, helping to start initiatives from the Jubilee 2000 coalition on third Third world World debt, the Fairtrade Mark and, most recently, the shoppers’ rights group Consumer Focus. The woman that brought us together, on the end of an email, is a radical economist from Boston, USAA, called Juliet Schor. High Nestled high up in the remote mountains of the French-Italian border in 2005, very far from the nearest billboard, Agnes was nestled reading up on pioneering research by Juliet on children’s mental health and their consumer involvement. A morning email across to Juliet, asking whether anyone was doing similar research in the UK, got an answer that afternoon – ‘you need to work with Ed’. Well, we took her advice and this book is the result. Three years on, there is now a good deal of research, some of it by us and some by others, which together reveals a fascinating picture of childhood and the way that companies interact with our families without us necessarily realizsing it. Perhaps we are so used to it that we can’t quite see it or understand it. But tThe creep and reach of marketing into the lives of children is a story that cries out to be told, both because of its rise to economic prominence and, as we shall see, its questionable effects. Chasing profit is what companies do and, in today’s consumer world, the children’s market is a goldrush opportunity for those prospecting for profit. Children really are good as gold. The child catchers To be sure, there are upsides. Life as a consumer is a story of fun for kids, with all of the pleasures and joys that unfold from their engagement with film, foods, toys, gadgets and games. By and large, children embrace these as opportunities, although, as we shall see, they are not uncritical. However, the downsides, we believe, are no less real and result, as night follows day, from the practices of the companies that we call the child catchers. These are businesses that are making calculated choices to target children at a younger and younger age. They play on their dreams and exploit their vulnerabilities. At the same time, they simultaneously re-sell nostalgic images of youth back to adults in a society that doesn’t really want to grow up and can stay young by buying for its children. All of this, of course, has an environmental edge to it, too. In the context of climate change, we are being asked to cut wasteful patterns of consumption at the same time as we are raising a new generation of eager consumer kids. The inner world of children is shaped by an outside world which promises happiness, freedom and fulfilment. These three wishes come not from a magic lamp but from being a consumer. As adults, we are all complicit in living out this consumer promise and perhaps even believing in it. What we have not confronted is the subject of this book, which is the dramatic step-change in the extent of commercial exposure that children now face. The commercial world that consumer kids inhabit, on phones, TVs or computers, is now far less mediated by adults than ever before. When opportunity becomes overload, this has a psychological effect and the evidence we set out clearly suggests that the more materialistic children become, the less happy they, and their family lives, are likely to be. Young people have their own words for this. For each chapter, we introduce the theme t