User:Oscar Nupra

Why are children increasingly targeted by corporations?

From my point of view, children represent an important targert for corporations because they have their own purchasing power, it means, that every kid has a strong influence on their parents’ decisions. Corporations take into account the fact that parents are willing to buy more products for their children in order to satisfy needs as well as family sizes are becoming smaller so there are more disposable incomes, also, corporations observe that today’s children have more autonomy and decision-making in the family than previous generations. This point reflects that children know how to persuade about what they want their parents to buy. We can think that corporations have an effective “convincing message” for children in the industrialized countries. But, since globalization has been taking part into this global integration of culture and economy, we realize that there are many companies that not necessary operate in the country where they were born or built, we also see that those companies have gone beyond borders and have touched other cultures.

Venezuela is one of the many examples where a foreign corporation arrives in order to influence the current way of marketing and create big impacts on individuals as well as on children, for example, Mcdonald’s uses many social and psychological strategies in order to persuade children to go and have a “happy time” in the beautiful and colorful parks while their parents are spending money in buying food, this U.S. corporation uses messages of happiness that make children think they will be happy if the visit that place, as a result, this markenting fact creates tendencies where children just want to go to Mcdonals to play and have fun with other kids in the park and if you see their little faces, you will see that they are not thinking of food at all. So, if children don’t go to this place to eat the “delicious food”, why is this corporation so interested as many other ones in children? Well, I think it is obvious that the ones who are going to spend money and consume all the products are children’s parents; here we can see how corporations use kids in order to make their parents come to the place and spend their money.

I guess that in order to target children, corporations need to know what makes kids happy, all this through a study of many aspects where they have to consider social, developmental or even emotional needs at different ages. Corporations take a moment to analyze children’s behavior, fantasy lives, art works, their dreams and then they elaborate psychological strategies that are going to be put into practice in order to make more effective the message for consumers (adults and children). Children will keep representing an importan target for corporations in the following years and the use of new strategies will arrive everyday in order to make children think that magical and incredible worlds are awaiting for them.

Essay written in the English Culture subject at ULA - 2007