From Savers to Spenders: How Children Became a Consumer Market
There was a time - in fact, only 30 or 40 years ago - when children were not spoken of as spenders or customers but as savers and future consumers. Sure, they bought penny candy and an occasional soft drink, but retailers did not think of them as customers per se. Children had money, but it was for saving, not spending. They were always saving up for something, according to them, but they never actually seemed to buy very much. They would, for example, save up for a football or bicycle, or even a college education, but usually these items and almost anything else they saved up for were bought by their parents or perhaps their grandparents.
All that changed with a phenomenon that we still talk about and write about, the baby boom. When World War II ended, families started having babies as if they were making up for all the lost war years. By 1950 the under-five population was 16,163,000 - an unheard of 60 percent increase in 10 years! As these baby boomers reached ages five to 12, their small amount of spending became very noticeable because of their substantially increased numbers. Moreover, these were prosperous years, and the amount that each child spent also increased; we do not know by how much because no one kept track. It was not considered important.
Three Markets in One
But, today, children are viewed as a viable market by many manufacturers and retailers. Saturday morning television, with its $100 million of child-focused advertising, is a moving monument to this new market.
Potentially, children constitute the most lucrative market there is for many businesses because the youngsters are actually three markets in one:
o They are a current market that spends $4.2 billion a year of their own money on their own desires. In this sense children are viewed as having needs, having money to spend on items that satisfy their needs, and having a willingness to spend money. Entire industries - such as producers of candy, gum, frozen desserts, soft drinks, toys, comic books, records and cassettes - treat children as a current market. At the retail level, such outlets as video game parlors, movie houses and convenience stores also treat children as a ready market.
o Children are a future market for most goods and services. Manufacturers and retailers respond to them as future consumers to be cultivated now. Thus, department stores have special promotions for children - a sci-fi Saturday, for example - to build store awareness for the day when they begin to buy their own clothes.
o Children also constitute a market of influentials who cause many billions of dollars of purchases among their parents. Probably best known of these marketers are cereal firms that intensively advertise to children on Saturday morning television and directly or indirectly encourage the children to persuade their parents to buy certain brands of cereal. In the spring of 1986, General Mills introduced a new presweetened cereal to children. Julie Franz wrote in Advertising Age, "General Mills promised grocery store buyers that 95 percent of all children ages two through 11 will see the Circus Fun TV spot an average of 107 times during the cereal's first year."
Parents strongly desire to prepare their children for adulthood or at least for self-sufficiency. This may be a carryover from our 19th Century agrarian society, but in any case this desire takes the form of providing skills to the youngsters so that they may cope without the assistance of parents. Being a consumer is one of these skill.
In the case of children, it might be appropriate to add a fifth requirement, that individuals in the group must have knowledge and understanding of the marketplace. It is one thing to have money and the willingness to spend it; it is quite another to understand how, where and when to spend it and what to spend it on. Although children as consumers have become a normal part of our socio-economic fabric, parents are creating many problems for themselves, for their children and for marketers by giving their children money and the encouragement to spend it. It certainly places a heavy responsibility on all three parties. There are no formal ground rules for children as consumers except the rules that apply to adults. Therefore, parents must be concerned with teaching their children consumer knowledge and skills, while marketers must be concerned with interacting properly with children in what is mainly an adult setting.
Being a consumer in our nation is a right. Being a marketer is a privilege. It is the marketer that must be licensed, not the consumer. Children have a right to be consumers in spite of some inadequacies - their limited abilities, their limited knowledge, and their clumsiness. If business chooses children as a target market, whether current, future or influential, it assumes the responsibility in general for acknowledging their inabilities.
