Food Advertising and Childhood Obesity

Examining Food Type, Brand Mascot Physique, Health Message, and Media

Fariba Esmaeilpour, Mitra Shabani Nashtaee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000043938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

This book explores the ways in which the environmental factor of advertising can influence children's food choice and health status, and how it contributes to the significant public health issue of childhood obesity.

Food Advertising and Childhood Obesity seeks to gain a better understanding of children's food choice based on children's exposure to different advertising by analyzing food type, brand mascot physique, health messages, and media. The book begins by reviewing the ways in which children become consumers and the role of advertising in this process. It then explores a range of advertising variables in children's food choice and consumption. This includes theoretical and practical discussion of foods and brand mascots, health messages embodied in food advertising, and comparisons of the effects of different advertising based on entertainment level, such as using new media to present 'advergames' supported by television advertising. Each chapter is supported with relevant theories and a research summary is presented on each topic for clarification. The book also introduces some ways of constructive working with children and concludes with a chapter dedicated to market research and children.

Written for students and practitioners of marketing, market research, and advertising, especially within the global food industry, this book offers readers a new approach to understanding child food choice and consumption that will inform effective corporate social responsibility strategies to address this issue.

1
Children as consumers

In 2013, 2.1 billion people worldwide were overweight or obese, including one in five children and adolescents aged 5 to 17 years in several high- and middle-income countries. According to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) estimation, more than 40 million children under the age of 5 years were overweight or obese in 2012 which, with current trends, may reach 70 million by 2025.

Food choice is one of the areas where children have gained major influence. This has caused concern about consuming diets high in fat and sugar but low in essential nutrients such as calcium, iron, and possibly antioxidant vitamins, which could have both short- and long-term adverse effects on children’s health. In other words, since children increasingly have more choice over the food that they consume, this may lead to diets of poor nutritional value. The pattern of food choice and consumption during childhood as a health-related behavior not only influences children’s quality of life but also likely persists in adulthood.

Children: consumers-in-training

Children are the largest market segment, and in many parts of the world they are more involved in choosing what to buy, use, and eat than they have ever been before. In today’s demanding economic climate where marketers face the challenge of growing brands and businesses, marketers look to the children’s market as a place to find new or increased current and future revenue. Since nobody has more lifetime value as a consumer than a child, the children’s market was always considered to be the market with the most growth potential. However, the world children live in has changed during recent decades and they now play a modified role in their families and in society to the point where marketers owe it to themselves to take a second look at children’s new acquired economic power. The days when children should be seen and not heard are long gone. They have more personal power, more money, more influence, and attention than any other generation before them. They’ve grown up faster and are more connected, more direct, and more informed.

Children make up three distinct segments including the primary, influence, and future markets. As a primary market, they represent a huge market for toys, apparel, and even electronics in that more than half of children aged 8 to 12 have their own cellphone and there are numerous tablets designed for them as well.

The influence market emerges when parents buy what their children tell them to buy. When a parental decision maker surrenders to a child’s request, parental yielding occurs. The likelihood of parental yielding occurring partly depends on the dynamics within a particular family. Parents have styles ranging from permissive to strict, and also vary in terms of the amount of responsibility children are given to make decisions.

Social power theory, as an appropriate theoretical framework to study children’s direct influence attempts, identifies the bases of power that are present in social interactions. This theory suggests that a person will make an assessment of his or her resources and choose an influence attempt that is consistent with his or her sources of social power. According to the conceptual framework of social power theory, children’s influence may be divided into two categories: direct (i.e. active) and indirect (i.e. passive). In a direct influence attempt, the agent’s actions are intended to affect a change in behavior, attitude, goal, need, or value on the part of the target. In parent-child interactions, a direct influence attempt is related to the sum of a child’s actions intended to direct a decision outcome according to his or her own preferences. In passive influence, a parent’s perception of a child’s unstated preferences influences a purchase decision. Unlike the passive influence, a direct influence attempt encompasses only those instances where a child takes goal-directed action toward influencing a decision. Direct influence is multidimensional and includes different influence strategies. Fourteen types of children’s power strategies – including asking, begging and pleading, telling or assertion, reasoning, demanding or arguing, state importance, bargaining, persistence, negative affect, positive affect, verbal manipulation, eliciting reciprocity, using an advocate, evasion, and laissez-faire – were found by Cowan et al. Cowan and Avants also identified strategies of ask, bargain, positive feelings, do as I please, tell, negative feelings, persistence, beg and plead, good deeds, reasoning, cry, and get angry.

Children are also considered a future market. They grow up quickly and purchase items such as photographic equipment and cell phones that adults normally purchase. Smart marketers are looking to establish brand loyalty at an early age. ‘Consumer socialization’ and ‘consumer development’ is how children become consumers.

Consumer socialization

The term socialization refers to processes by which individuals learn to participate effectively in the social environment. Zigler and Child use the term this way:

Socialization is a broad term for the whole process by which an individual develops, through transaction with other people, his specific patterns of socially relevant behaviors and experience.

Socialization is related to the learning of social roles and the behavior associated with those roles. Accordingly, consumer socialization is the processes by which young people acquire skills, knowledge, and attitudes relevant to their functioning as consumers in the marketplace. The focus of this definition is on childhood socialization, not on all learning that takes place during this period of time. Also, the discussion is limited to marketplace transactions. It means that the focus is on consumption-relevant skills, knowledge, and attitudes. In addition, there is a distinction between skills, knowledge, and attitudes that are directly relevant to consumption behavior; and skills, knowledge, and attitudes that are indirectly relevant to consumption behavior. Directly relevant skills, knowledge, and attitudes are used for enactment of the consumer role. Some examples are skills at budgeting, pricing, knowledge of brand attitudes and shopping outlets, and attitudes toward products, brands, and salespeople. Consumer role enactment may occur during the physical act of purchasing. It also can refer to the set of physical and mental activities specifically involved in purchase decisions, talking to others about products and brands, and weighing purchase criteria. However, more importantly for many consumption behaviors are the indirectly relevant skills, knowledge, and attitudes that motivate purchases. For example, a college student who purchases a dark suit for a business interview is acting according to perceived norms and role requirements associated with job interviews. For understanding the purchase, the knowledge and attitudes concerning the interview situation norms and associated role requirements are important.

Consumer socialization research is dominated by four main theoretical approaches including cognitive development theory, social development theory, interpersonal communication theory, and learning theory. These approaches will be explained next.

Cognitive development theories

According to cognitive development theories that stem from the work of Jean Piaget, socialization is a function of qualitative changes in one’s cognitive organization between infancy and adulthood. These change stages are based on cognitive structures used by the child in perceiving and coping with the environment at different ages. Four main stages of Piaget’s cognitive development theory are sensorimotor (birth to 2 years), preoperational (2 to 7 years), concrete operational (7 to 11 years), and formal operational (after 11 years). Differences of these stages are in terms of abilities and resources available to children. Between stages, consumer researchers focus on three last stages including preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Children’s symbolic thought develops in the preoperational stage but is still very focused on perceptual properties of stimuli. In the preoperational stage, children tend to be perceptually bound to the readily observable aspects of their environment. Centration (i.e. the tendency to focus on a single dimension) is another characteristic of preoperational children. In contrast, in the concrete operational stage, children can consider several dimensions of a stimulus at a time and relate those dimensions in a thoughtful and relatively abstract way. Finally, in the formal operational stage, children move to more adult-like thought patterns and are capable of even more complex thought about concrete and hypothetical objects and situations.

Among cognitive development theories, information processing theories also provide explanatory power for the types of children’s cognitive abilities as they mature. Although there are several formulations of information processing theory, all of them focus on children’s developing skills in the areas of acquisition, encoding, organizing, and retrieval of information. Accordingly, based on their information-processing skills, children are considered as belonging to one of three segments: strategic processors, cued processors, or limited processors. Strategic processors (age 12 and older) use a variety of strategies such as verbal labeling, rehearsal, and use of retrieval cues to guide memory search for storing and retrieving information. Cued processors (from 7 to 11 years) use a similar set of strategies to enhance information storage and retrieval, but typically need to be aided by explicit prompts or cues. In other words, they have the ability to use processing strategies but do not spontaneously produce these strategies when needed. Finally, limited processors’ (under the age of seven) processing skills are not yet fully developed or successfully utilized in learning situations. These processors often have difficulty using storage and retrieval strategies even when prompted to do so.

The cognitive development stages provide a basis for explaining the emergence of a variety of socialization outcomes. For example, children’s ability to distinguish advertising (as a persuasive means) from television programming grows during these stages. Information processing views also explain this finding in terms of children’s abilities to retrieve and use information.

Social development theory

Social development includes a wide variety of topics such as moral development, altruism and pro-social development, impression formation, and social perspective taking. Among these topics, social perspective taking and impression formation are the most directly relevant to consumer socialization. For example, social perspective taking – the ability of seeing perspectives beyond one’s own – is strongly related to purchase influence and negotiation skills. Impression formation – the ability of making social comparisons – can also help with understanding the social aspects of products and consumption.

Social perspective taking describes how children’s abilities to understand different perspectives progress through a series of stages. In the egocentric stage (ages 3 to 6), children are unaware of any point of view other than their own. As they grow, in the social informational role-taking stage (ages 6 to 8), children become aware that others may have different opinions or motives because of having different information. However, they do not still consider the different perspectives on the situation as the reason for having different opinions. Thus, children in the social informational role-taking stage do not have the ability to actually think from another person’s perspective. This ability surfaces in the stage of self-reflective role taking (ages 8 to 10). In this stage, children not only understand that others may have different opinions or motives but also can actually consider another person’s viewpoint. The ability of simultaneously considering another person’s viewpoint at the same time as one’s own emerges in the fourth stage of mutual role taking (ages 10 to 12). In the stage of social and conventional system role taking (ages 12 to 15 and older), children acquire the ability to understand another person’s perspective as a member of the social group or a person who work for the social system.

Barenboim, through impression formation, provided a description of the developmental sequence that takes place from 6 to 12 years of age. Barenboim believed that children describe other people in concrete or absolute terms before the age of 6. They often mention physical appearances or overt behaviors. In Barenboim’s first stage, the behavioral comparisons phase (ages 6 to 8), children do incorporate comparisons as a basis of their impressions. These comparisons continue based on concrete attributes or behaviors. In the second stage, the psychological constructs phase (ages 8 to 10), impressions are based on psychological or abstract attributes, but do not include comparisons to others. In the psychological comparisons phase (ages 11 to 12 and older), comparisons are done based on psychological or abstract attributes, and children exhibit more adult-like impressions.

Interpersonal communications theory

According to all definitions of interpersonal communications, at least two people must be involved and an object of communication must be present. Social communication theorists can be divided roughly between those who are concerned with the interactants’ cognitive orientations to events and issues in the world outside their immediate context (A-X and B-X relationships) and those who stress elements of interpersonal relationships (A-B relationships). It seems that consumer socialization proceeds more through subtle interpersonal processes than through direct and purposive consumer training in families or schools. Purposive consumer training by parents occurs infrequently and parents have only general consumer goals for their children such as teaching children about price-quality relationships. Although informal interpersonal communication processes occur in several types of social settings (e.g. with peers, siblings, or parents), the family context of interpersonal communication have the greatest influence in consumer socialization.

Family communication is the overt interactions between family members. This communication, which is concerned with participation in family consumer tasks and decisions, influences children’s attitudes toward advertising and increases their economic motivations for consumption. Peer communication is also the overt peer-adolescent interactions and is conceptualized as encouragement or approval of certain behaviors and intentions through either spoken (reinforcement) or unspoken (modeling) messages that peers send to each other. This communication has a significant influence on attitudes toward advertising, materialistic values, and social motivations for consumption. Peers can have a significant effect on children’s product evaluation.

Learning theory

Almost all definitions of socialization share at least one common element that is variously expressed in verb form as ‘acquires’, ‘develops’, or ‘transmits’. This element means that socialization results in a relatively permanent change in the behavior of an individual. The generic term for this relatively permanent change is ‘learning’. In consumer socialization, there is not an agreement about employing learning theories because formal learning theories are different in terms of process, content, and goal.

As purposive consumer training rarely occurs in families, children may learn certain consumer skills through observation and imitation. According to Bandura’s argument, such learning processes explain how material objects acquire social meaning throug...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Children as consumers
• 2 Advertising targeting children
• 3 Advertising and food choice
• 4 Stereotyping and advertising characters/mascots
• 5 Health messages; as a food product appeal
• 6 Food product placement: integration of advertising and entertainment
• 7 Marketing research and children
• Appendix 1: Summary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
• Appendix 2: Theories and models
• Bibliography
• Index