Understanding children’s developmental stages is the foundation for marketing directed at kids.

Via Derek Baird, here’s a slide show created by Dan Pankraz, an Australian “youth planning specialist.” Keep in mind that I’m not picking on Mr. Pankraz in particular. This is just an example of how marketers go about trying to influence your children.

In summary, a marketer’s job is to:

– Help young children feel imaginative, clever, understood, connected, and valued;
– Help “tweens” feel self-confident and proud; and
– Help teens feel independent.

Excuse me, but isn’t that my job?

The lie in all this, the lie that can lead to family stress, depression and low self-esteem, is that children will not really feel understood, self-confident or independent by buying something.

This is exploitation for profit — pure and simple. And how youth marketers can continue to use kids’ developmental deficiencies to make money is beyond me.

Remember, kids are not little adults. They do not understand the intention of commercial messages the way we do.

Talk to your kids. Constantly. Because marketers do.

New resource for kids, parents and teachers: Admongo.gov, the FTC’s advertising literacy site

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10, 2010 at 12:59 pm and is filed under American corporate capitalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.