Marketers would like a branch on your family tree
To combat excessive marketing to children, it’s important to understand how marketers think. How do they plan to get into your child’s head — and into yours?
While writing a post on extravagant birthday parties, I ran across the 2007 Youth Marketing Mega Event, a conference for marketers hoping to leverage the “kids, tweens, teens, and college student” markets.
I found some of the sessions particularly outrageous. Is this what marketers are really thinking about?
Create Online Loyalty Programs: Kid Friendly and COPPA Compliant. Sure, those pesky laws to protect children’s privacy online have really taken a bite out of our bottom line, but there’s no law against manipulating the little tykes! At least not yet!
Kids & Wellness: It’s the Next Big Thing, But it’s Already Here. Since those tree-hugging-hippie-health-nut scientists have somehow convinced the public that consuming an all-junk-food diet while sitting on the sofa playing Xbox isn’t actually good for kids, let’s jump on the bandwagon! Quick!
Leveraging Viral Marketing Through In-School Promotion to Start a Marketing Revolution! Kids in school are a captive market — if they try to get away, they’ll get sent to the principal’s office! There’s no way they can ignore us! Bonus: we’ll tempt the teacher with incentives, say, textbooks? And cut a check to the administration while we’re at it! They can’t say no, because they need the money!
Growing a Branch for your Brand on the Family Tree: Achieving Loyalty with the Family.* Well, now that’s just clever metaphor-making. Wait, shouldn’t it be Growing a Branch on the Family Tree for Your Brand?
Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat thinking about the corporate dollars spent on new ways to manipulate my children. In a world of mounting personal debt and limited natural resources, is this akin to offering a kid a lollypop to get in the car?
*Not really a session title. I think it was a bullet about the conference’s goals. Or reasons to attend the conference. Something like that.
Originally published as a similar post at twoknives.net