This is the twelfth discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the latter half of the seventh chapter, “Habit Formation,” starting on page 130 at the subheading “Who’s Responsible, Parents or Advertisers?” and finishing out the chapter, ending on page 139.

I’ll be frank: I feel that the responsibility for consumer education falls squarely on the shoulders of parents. Parents are the ones that make the choice to turn on the television and allow their children to watch it. Parents are the ones that allow their children to drive purchasing decisions. Parents are the primary educators of their children. Most important, parents are the ones making food choices, and they’re the ones choosing to put prepackaged foods or fresh foods on the table. Add those up and it’s pretty clear to me that marketing is like a never-ending flow of water – but parents are the tap, able to slow down or turn off the flow as desired. You’re a parent, you’re responsible.

I’m a parent of two kids and I know quite well that this is a difficult stance to take. It’s really easy to get irate at marketers and blame them for creating clever packaging. I’ve watched my son nearly bounce off the wall for specific treats already – and I’m aware that the biggest part of that is clever methods by marketers. Seriously, what child wouldn’t want smiling, cheese-flavored fish crackers in a brightly colored bag? The marketers make it tough – they make the crackers out of whole grain and the nutrition facts on the package indicate that they aren’t entirely unhealthy…

And that’s where the rubber meets the road. I’m a parent. I’m the one making that purchasing decision. Beyond that, my son is sitting there taking cues from me – parents are the first role models that a child has, not the marketers. It’s up to me to make the right decision – all marketers do is make that right decision a little bit tougher.

Schor’s Counterargument
Schor makes a strong counterargument to this case on page 130:

A second industry theme is that parents can “just say no.” Paul Kurnit takes the view that “if you don’t want your child to eat pre-sweetened cereals, don’t buy them. If you don’t want your child to eat at McDonald’s, don’t take your child to McDonald’s. I mean, on some level it is truly that simple.” [Child marketer Amanda] Carlson concurs: “They [the parents] should set the guidelines. They should set precedents. They should be good examples, which they’re not, in terms of how to eat healthfully.”

A careful look at industry practices suggests things aren’t as simple as Kurnit and others claim. The soft drink companies have demanded exclusive access in schools. The chains dominate highway rest stops, airports, malls, and other public places, so fast or junk food is usually all that’s available. Agriculture and food lobbies have pushed through food disparagement laws in twelve states where they’re politically powerful. (These laws make certain statements about food products illegal.)

The argument that Schor is making is that governments have given the food industry unfair advantage over consumers, and I do agree that these moves do make it harder for parents to make good choices.

But the answers are out there and they’re not really very hard to follow, either. In Michael Pollan’s excellent book on modern eating, In Defense of Food (which I discussed a while back), he basically boils down everything a parent needs to know about a healthy modern diet into just seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Obviously, a bit of clarification is needed here – by “food,” he means not prepackaged stuff, but as much fresh stuff as you can get into the diet. Stick to the fresh produce section and the meat counter at your local grocery – that’s where the vast majority of your grocery shopping should be.

What about the convenience situations, like when you’re on a road trip and the only easy options are fast foods? That’s easy, too – plan in advance and pack a “road picnic.” It takes about ten minutes and enables you to stop off at a nice park to eat a meal instead of at Mickey D’s. If you just want to cure the munchies, pack a bag of baby carrots or a 100% juice box instead of an order of fries and a giant Slurpee.

What about emotional contradictions, with things like GoGurt? On page 131:

Carlson explained that the marketers are “using words like health … wholesome. Teddy Grahams are probably wholesome … You have the goodness of graham … There’s definitely a halo. I mean, parents will look at Lucky Charms and say, ‘Well, it’s oats.’ They look at Go-gurt that has twelve grams of sugar and say, ‘Well, it’s yogurt. It’s got that bacteria in it that’s good for you.’” Taking advantage of these emotional contradictions has contributed to a pervasive loosening of parental rules around food. Faced with the barrage of food advertisement, too few parents have been able to hold their ground.

When I read this, I don’t blame the barrage of food advertisement, I blame the inability of a parent to walk down the yogurt aisle and compare the nutrition facts label between several kinds of yogurt and make the choice that’s best for their kids. Reading, understanding, and knowing how to use a nutrition facts label is vital for any parent in the modern world – if you can’t do that or are unwilling to, you’re shortchanging your child.

Sure, there are obstacles, but the ultimate responsibility is up to the parent.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the first portion of the eighth chapter, “How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well Being,” starting on page 140 and continuing until the subheading “Patterns of Media Use” on page 153.

This is the eleventh discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the first half of the seventh chapter, “Habit Formation,” starting on page 119 and ending after page 129 at the subheading “Who’s Responsible: Parents or Advertisers?”.

When Sunny Delight first came on the market in our area in about 1989, my best friend at the time became borderline obsessed with the stuff. I personally thought it was awful – it tasted like a mix of stale orange juice and pure Karo syrup, but my pal would regularly choose it over orange juice, even bringing a jug of it with him when he came over to our house because it was so much “better” than orange juice.

At the time, I just sort of nodded my head and would occasionally drink some of it, at one point even convincing my mother that I liked the stuff, resulting in her buying it a few times when it was on sale. Eventually, though, she got the hint: I simply didn’t drink the stuff unless my friends were around.

Was it marketing, or did my friend really like Sunny D? When I read through this part of Born to Buy, I couldn’t help but wonder.

Kids Versus Adults

From page 122:

Themes of kid empowerment and antiadultism are used to sell ostensibly mundane items such as snacks and cereal. [Food advertiser Amanda] Carlson described the agency’s approach for one sugary snack: “It’s empowering because it’s a snack that’s really very kid-proprietary, it’s not for adults … sometimes it’s licensed so it has shapes that only kids would like. There’s also an element of separation in there because it separates me from you: This is my snack. It’s a little irreverent. It’s something your mom might not want you eating, so that gives you power.”

When I first read this book, shortly after the birth of my first child, this section didn’t really make much sense to me. Sure, I had memories of childhood where I did things with my cousins and with my friends that were very much kid-oriented – we played with toys, had an old beat-up shed as a “clubhouse,” and so on. What I didn’t really remember was how that extended to food.

Already, with my son just two years old, I see it. Just last night, we had homemade pizza, and as it was being assembled, I realized that at least part of the ingredient selection for the pizza was due to my son’s preferences. He loves black olives, far more than his mother does, so I moved the black olives around so that a little more than half the pizza was coated in them (I like them, too). On the other hand, he doesn’t like mushrooms, so I moved the mushrooms around to only cover part of the pizza (I like them, so they covered part of the “black olive” section). In effect, it wound up almost being three pizzas in one – one piece with light black olives, one piece with heavy black olives, and another piece with heavy black olives and mushrooms.

My son was immediately able to identify which portion of the pizza was his – lots of “tires” (as he calls black olives) and no “mushy rooms” (as he calls mushrooms). It was a distinct portion just for him – different than what mom and dad were eating. I think this distinctiveness was part of the appeal – it’s a sign of independence and freedom.

Right now, the bridge hasn’t been made to food marketing, but it’s easy to see how it would be. “This is a pizza for kids!” it would say, and it would show off his favorite ingredients and probably come with a toy car and a premium price. It offers that same sense of independence and distinctiveness – natural things that growing children strive for.

No wonder kids want junk food that’s marketed to them. It tugs on their natural developmental tendencies.

Food as Addiction
On page 125, Schor makes a great case that the marketing of junk food to kids often uses adult behavior as a model, but transforms it into something palatable for kids:

If the idea of food as drugs sounds far-fetched, consider the findings of Wynne Tyree, director of research at JustKid, Inc.: “Kids say they use sugar like adults use coffee – to give them a boost. Since coffee isn’t allowed, and they have no other means to ‘get them going’ or ‘give them energy,’ they use soda, chocolate, candy, and sugary fruit drinks. It gives them the jolts they say they need throughout the day.”

In other words, some of the marketing relies on another natural aspect of childhood development – emulative play. Kids often pretend to be adults – think of a little girl taking care of her doll. Now, imagine a kid observing their zombie-like parent stumbling into the kitchen in the morning, eager to get their fix of coffee to help them get started.

It’s a behavior that kids are going to emulate – when they feel a natural energy lag, they’ll do what their parents do. They’ll find something that will pep them up, and marketers are quite happy to provide them with a boost in the form of a really sugary soda or an energy drink. Why do you think many soda ads and energy drink ads depict people burning a lot of energy in a very loud fashion?

I’m not condemning adults drinking coffee – I don’t drink any, but my wife often does. I am saying, though, that it makes sense that children would want to emulate it and, from there, marketers would take advantage of this natural emulation that children perform.

These examples have one thing in common: they take advantage of natural child development. Almost all children exhibit a certain set of natural behaviors – it’s part of the development of their mind as they grow. Sure enough, marketers are on board each step of the way.

What can you do to help? Be a model parent. Eat healthy foods so that when your kids emulate you, they eat healthy, too. Don’t exhibit substance addictions unless you’re fine with your children emulating it. They look to you for many of their cues – don’t give them bad ones.

The next discussion, coming in three days, will cover the latter half of the seventh chapter, “Habit Formation,” starting on page 130 at the subheading “Who’s Responsible: Parents or Advertisers?” and finishing out the rest of the chapter.

This is the tenth discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the the latter part of the sixth chapter, “Dissecting the Child Consumer,” starting on page 109 at the subheading “Inside the Child Brain” and continuing through the rest of the chapter.

Most of this section covers the nuts and bolts of how companies engage in research when it comes to children and, quite frankly, most of it comes down to money. Many of the more intense research programs pay the children (or parents of the children) when they “volunteer” to participate in a focus group or another marketing research program.

I found two quite interesting pieces in this section.

Is Marketing Research Child Labor?
On page 115, Schor mentions:

Watching the bedraggled crowd at one focus group site as the evening (a school night) wore on, I wondered why this phenomenon has stayed out of public view. We don’t let eleven year olds staff fast food joints at 8:30 on weeknights. Why hasn’t there been any discussion of their work at the local focus group facility?

I think I can actually answer that question. It’s because information work – white collar work – is perceived differently than labor. In other words, work in a focus group is seen as existing under different rules than work in a fast food restaurant.

You can see it quite often in the adult world, where IT workers are required to have their cell phones on at all times. On the other hand, factory workers clock out and completely forget about their workplace. Businessmen are chained to their Blackberries, but waitresses go off duty and forget about the restaurant. Construction workers leave their cranes behind at the end of the day – but other workers come home with a briefcase or a laptop in hand.

Unfair labor laws exist all over the place for blue collar jobs, but not for white collar jobs. Why is this? In the past, blue collar jobs were the ones that could be exploited for profit, as white collar jobs merely existed to manage the work of blue collar jobs.

In the information economy, though, white collar workers are now doing much of the actual productive work, but the perception that white collar jobs don’t demand any labor protections still exists.

It’s this same perception that allows children to be at the focus group until very late, earning their pay for being in the marketing program, but they’re not allowed to flip burgers at the restaurant.

An interesting double standard, isn’t it?

Childhood Friendships for Fun and Profit!
Another interesting aspect of all of this pops up on page 116:

I encountered other troubling aspects of the research process, such as the use of one child to recruit others. In these cases, full disclosure to both children and parents is much harder to ensure. The research cannot be certain about how a situation is being described and the preconceptions friends are coming with. The recruiting child also has a financial incentive to get others to participate, which raises the potential for exploitation.

This sounds an awful lot like multi-level marketing to me – Amway/Quixtar for kids, in other words, where people make income at least in part by recruiting others into the system. The only catch here is that it’s kids effectively doing it to other kids – they’re convincing playground chums to sign up in order to make profit for themselves.

It’s hard enough for adults to distinguish social marketing techniques – have you ever been seduced by a salesman into buying a product, for example, or witnessed it happening? It’s even worse when you introduce such factors to kids who are at least as prone to social acceptance and don’t have the years of life experience needed to build up a good filter against such marketing.

There are times when I genuinely feel uncomfortable about the issues I face raising my kids today.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the first half of the seventh chapter, “Habit Formation,” starting on page 119 and ending after page 129 at the subheading “Who’s Responsible: Parents or Advertisers?”.

This is the ninth discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the the first part of the sixth chapter, “Dissecting the Child Consumer,” starting on page 99 and ending on page 108 at the subheading “Inside the Child Brain.”

I’m reminded of an experience I had interacting with a marketer in college who was apparently doing some test marketing on those college credit card booths. I was walking by such a booth and was basically eyeing it from a distance away before I walked by. A marketing guy ran up to me and asked why I didn’t stop and I gave him several reasons which he wrote down.

I didn’t really think about it at the time, but later when I reflected, I realized I had basically just told him how to make this credit card offer more juicy for college students – and I felt sort of used and rather idiotic.

This experience floated through my mind when I read through much of this section.

Where Good Ideas Come From
Marketers have gotten very good at harnessing children’s creativity. The chapter opens with a great example of this, on page 99:

Picture the following scene: Caitlin, a five-year-old girl, and Mary Prescott, a thirty-something woman with a video camera, are sitting on the floor of Caitlin’s bedroom. Caitlin’s mother is in the kitchen, because Mary has explained that for this project, she needs private time with Caitlin. They’re talking about baths and what Caitlin does when she takes one. The client, a health and beauty aids company with a bubble bath product, wants to explore Caitlin’s feelings about bath time and learn what she actually does while she’s bathing. After some talk, caitlin leads Prescott and her camera into the bathroom, where Mary spies a shelf full of empty shampoo and bubble bath bottles. She learns that Caitlin plays with them during her bath, which leads to the consumer insight that kids turn soap containers into toys. Prescott explains that had she done the research in a focus group facility or even in the kitchen, she wouldn’t have happened upon the empty containers. And they were the key finding of the study.

Many of you were probably wondering why Mary was even in the home in the first place; it’s because Caitlin’s family was paid an unspecified but apparently sizable amount of money for such intrusive research.

Anyway, to the point: this pretty much uncovers where great marketing ideas come from. My son has a soap container in the bathtub that’s in the shape of a car, and it wasn’t very long ago at all that I was reflecting on how intelligent that idea was. My son plays with it in every bath he takes and has a lot of fun having the car drive off the bath ledge and splash into the water.

But, on another level, I recognize that the shape of the bottle is part of why I chose to buy that particular variant of the soap (the same soap, a brand we always use, comes in “normal” bottles, too). I paid a slight premium for the bottle because it was easy to think of my son having fun in the tub with it – and likely we’ll keep the bottle when it’s empty or else refill it with more soap.

Was this a good choice? You could really argue both ways about it, but we’d all probably agree that the real winner is the soap company. Because they came up with a clever idea for a bottle shape – likely as a direct result of Prescott’s study – they likely made a bit more profit on that bottle than a normal one. Even if they just made another $0.10 because of the bottle, if 500,000 parents make the same choice I do over the next year, that’s $50,000 in the corporate coffers for likely just a few days’ worth of research work.

What’s happening here is effectively survival of the fittest. Companies are continually making products that are more attractive to consumers – and they evolve over time. Quite frankly, the items on our grocery shelf today are far more attractive, interesting, and useful than the items of thirty years ago, and that makes the actual decisions that need to be made while shopping that much more difficult. With research like this, it’s not surprising at all that new ideas are being pumped out all the time – they just go straight to the source of the creative ideas. In this case, they mined Caitlin’s creativity – she likes playing with the bottles in the bathtub, and a few years later, it results in a compelling product that my son’s playing with in the bathtub.

Marketing is a very strong force, indeed.

Why Kids Participate in Marketing Studies
A while back, I talked about the marketing for P-O-X, a game designed and marketed to pre-teen boys in which the “alpha boys” were given the product for free in a marketing effort and participated in a whole lot of focus group testing. When I thought about this, I realized that the draw of free stuff encouraged the kids to participate, but I really couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t more to it. I know that when I was a kid, I would not have spent days and days in focus group meetings just to get a free toy. So why would kids participate?

Schor has a great answer on page 108:

But Sharon Fogg, Laura Groppe, and others are adamant that kids participate because they are thrilled to have someone who is actually listening to them and acting on their advice. These marketers portray a world in which parents and teachers are not paying attention or empowering kids.

That makes complete sense. Participating in a focus group or even one-on-one with a marketer can feel really empowering on some level, even for an adult – your comments are being used to guide the decisions of a large corporation. In the eyes of a kid? That feels like an amazing amount of power.

Since it’s obvious why marketers would want input from their target audience and it’s pretty clear why the kids would want to participate, this seems like a very natural marketing technique.

The question is would you encourage or allow your child to participate in a marketing panel? I actually would – and I’d use it to have a lot of follow-up conversation with my child. Why? Such a panel is a perfect time for a kid to comprehend how marketing works.

Would you let your child participate in such a forum? Why or why not? Would you let a marketer in your home for research like what was described above with Mary and Caitlin? I think there’s some interesting personal boundary lines here.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the latter half of the sixth chapter, “Dissecting the Child Consumer,” starting on page 109 “Inside the Child Brain” and ending on page 118.

This is the eighth discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the whole of chapter five, “The Commercialization of Public Schools.”

A significant portion of this chapter has to do with Channel One, which is basically a ten-minute “news” program delivered directly to schools – coupled with two minutes of commercials, of course. Schools who participated were given a lot of equipment, along with the promise of delivering compelling content to the students in exchange for merely guaranteeing that a certain number of students watched each day.

For a while in junior high, we were jammed into a classroom and Channel One was turned on for all of us to enjoy. Most of the students slept through the news portions, but I do remember an ad for Pepsi that was very loud – much louder than the rest of the programming – and it triggered some of the slumbering students to wake up and pay attention to what was going on.

At the time, I was basically indifferent to all of this. I told my teacher that I thought it was dumb, and he basically agreed but said that if it encouraged kids to think about current events, then it was worthwhile – and I pretty much bought that idea.

Now I’m not so sure, and Schor makes a very good case against it in this section, along with other in-school marketing techniques.

Does Marketing in Schools Matter?
On page 86, Schor states:

Studies comparing Channel One to non-Channel One schools show that the program affects kids’ attitudes. A study of two Michigan high schools found that Channel One students are more likely to agree that “a nice car is more important than school,” that “designer labels make a difference,” and that “wealthier people are happier than the poor.” Channel One students have also been reported to feel that the products advertised are good for them, because they’re being shown in the classroom.

In other words, students by default trust what’s presented to them in the classroom.

It’s easy to talk about educating children to guard against this kind of stuff. It’s also easy to blame school administrators and teachers for letting this in the classroom. Frankly, though, the blame for things like this falls on society in general. Every time we vote down a proposition to fund schools, we push them a little closer to things like Channel One. Every time we don’t get involved and pressure our politicians to adequately fund schools, we force school administrators to make tough choices about what compromises have to be made. As Schor says on page 90, “the main impetus for commercialization is the chronic underfunding of schools.”

If you really want to make a difference with things like this, get politically involved. Send letters to your senators and your representative in Congress and every person representing you in the state legislature. Look for political action committees to join to help get more funding for schools. Don’t just sit there and complain about it if it bothers you – do something. What’s my “something”? I’m getting involved with my district’s school board.

Is private school the answer for my child? Perhaps. It’s quite expensive, but it does have a lot of benefits. No matter what you choose, though, the answer is to be involved – and not just in your child. Look for ways to change the larger issues as well.

Creative Thinking
I will give the marketers credit for creativity. Most of this chapter lists various ways marketers have found their ways into classrooms. Here are three that I was particularly impressed by.

General Mills paid Minnesota teachers $250 each to paint ads for Reese’s Puffs cereal on their cars and instructed them to place the cars next to where the school buses parked.

[...] word problems in a McGraw-Hill math textbook that included Nike, Gatorade, Topps trading cards, and Disneyland as examples.

In 2001, NetworkNext announced 500 contracts with schools to show ads in return for a mobile computer unit to use for PowerPoint and other presentations. When the teacher shows a slide, banner ads for Rock Star video games, Wal-Mart, Visa Buxx cards, and Coty products appear on the screen.

In other words, marketers use every technique you can imagine to infiltrate the classroom, an area where in theory a student is supposed to trust the teacher and have their mind open to absorbing new ideas. It’s not just limited to stuff like Channel One – it’s in every aspect of schools.

When I was in school, our school was given a mountain of paper book covers that depicted ads for various companies. Not only that, there was a stipend given to pay some student workers to cover all of the textbooks for the school in these covers. Since these covers could reduce actual wear and tear on the books and extend their life a year or two at no cost to the school, our school obviously went for it for at least one year. Thus, every time we sat down to learn and looked down at the cover of our book, we saw ads.

It goes on and on and on – and the root cause of it is schools that don’t have enough money to do the things they want to do. So they find other methods – and marketers are happy to help.

Curriculum Editing
Even more interesting is the idea that companies and marketers are actually developing teaching materials for the classrooms, providing teachers with the curriculum and materials needed to teach a topic. A pair of great examples comes from Schor on page 93:

A Kellogg’s breakfast curriculum presents fat content as the only thing to worry about when choosing breakfast food. There is no mention of sugar or salt in Kellogg’s cereals. A first grade reading curriculum has the kids start out by recognizing logos from K-Mart, Pizza Hut, M&M’s, Jell-O, and Target.

These are just two of the examples from the book, but they get the idea across loud and clear: marketers present ready-made materials for teachers to use in the classroom that slip in some corporate marketing, again taking deep advantage of the level of classroom intellectual openness and trust.

Most good teachers would see right through this stuff and not present it, but let’s be frank – there are a lot of teachers out there that would be happy to have a curriculum already made for them and would justify such marketing stuff as “consumer education.”

It again comes down to one thing: be involved. And by that, don’t just be directly involved in your children’s education. Step up to the plate and make an effort to seek societal change, because when students are engaged in brand marketing at such a young age and in a trusted environment like a classroom, the next obvious step is for them to become consumers, continuing the trend of overspending and self-confidence that relies on the stuff you have, not on the person you are.

The next discussion, coming in three days, will cover the first half of the sixth chapter, “Dissecting the Child Consumer,” starting on page 99 and ending on page 108 at the subheading “Inside the Child Brain.”

This is the seventh discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the whole of chapter four, “The Virus Unleashed.”

This chapter basically dissects how exactly a children’s fad is marketed – in this case, a potential fad in the making called POX that was doomed by very bad timing. Thus, I found it worthwhile during this section to think about fads when I was a kid – and I couldn’t help but think about Wacky Wall Walkers for some reason.

For those unaware, Wacky Wall Walkers were a short-lived fad circa 1983. They were simply sticky seven-legged things that looked like an octopus, but if you chucked them at a smooth wall (like glass or some wallpaper), they’d seemingly “walk” down them, meaning they’d slowly fall down the surface to the floor.

The piece of the puzzle I remember was racing down the cereal aisle with my brother, each of us seeking to grab a box of cereal that contained one of these precious toys. They were only in Kellogg’s cereals, and I recall them not being in every box, so we’d dig through the boxes looking for ones that indicated that they contained a Wall Walker.

What I didn’t fully realize then is how ingenious this really was for Kellogg’s. These Wall Walkers couldn’t have cost Kellogg’s more than a nickel wholesale, but adding that nickel’s worth of an item to the cereal and combining it with a great advertisement campaign made the Wall Walker – and thus the cereal – something that I had to have.

Alpha Kids
Schor, starting on page 71, discusses an interesting branch of marketing to children (with my own bolding for emphasis):

The plan called for identifying what are known as alpha kids, or as Matt Schneider, president of Target Productions, the company that coordinated the operations for this campaign, called them, alpha pups. These are the coolest, most socially dominant, trendsettingest kids in the community. In this case, the kids were found through an elaborate, labor-intensive process of interviewing thousands of kids on playgrounds, in arcades, and at other kidspaces, and asking, “Who’s the coolest kid you know?” until they got to the one that said “Me!” [...] They had identified 1,527 boys who fit the criterion of ultimate cool and were willing to participate in the program. They boys attended an “indoctrination” where they watched a video about POX, became official “secret agents,” and accepted a secret mission and set of instructions on how to “infect” ten friends. Then they were given a backpack filled with tattoos, shirts, and hats, plus ten POX units, which they had to pass along to a a list of friends whose names would then be provided to the company. In return for their cooperation, each kid received $30.

You can read more about the POX marketing effort here.

In a nutshell, their marketing plan went far beyond simply selling on television – they actually went into the neighborhoods, identified the “cool” kids, and then bribed those kids to play with and talk about POX. They gave the kids each ten free units (to give to all of their friends) and $30 cash – basically, a bribe. It’s pretty easy to see how that kid would then go home and hand out the toys to the people in his inner circle – the “cool kids” – and then they would use their possession of these items as a symbolic badge of something the cool kids have, thus pressuring the other kids to have them, too.

In other words, the marketing here is directly tied into a child’s need for social acceptance. The “cool kids” have these toys, so they’ll want one too – except the cool kids were given the toys and basically paid to play with them.

For me, this takes marketing to a whole new level, one that I can’t really control as a parent. When a child’s interaction with his peers is interfered with by marketing, it becomes really clear to me that it’s important to equip your children with some good consumer skills and social skills – and equip them young – so that they see right through this kind of thing. It’s all about the education.

One of the quotes that has deeply driven me in my life comes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

A person’s color, gender, religion, or family background is not the important part about them. Neither are the things that they have. This is true on the playground and in our daily life when we think about trying to keep up with the Joneses.

It’s only the content of the character that really counts, and that’s the one lesson I hope I can teach my kids, more than anything else. If you really get that, then the alpha kid influence really doesn’t mean that much at all – it doesn’t matter what stuff a person has, it matters what kind of character that person has.

Cashing in on Friendship
It goes beyond the “alpha kids,” too. From page 77:

An even more serious consequence is the corruption of friendship itself. Marketers are teaching kids to view their friends as a lucrative resource they can exploit to gain products or money. They even counsel kids to be “slick” with their friends.

A bit of background: this snippet is actually discussing a specific instance of this very marketing technique, called Girls Intelligence Agency. GIA basically gives products to girls, then instructs them to have slumber parties where they distribute the product to the other people there and then solicits reactions from them. In other words, the girls participating in GIA have become paid marketers to their friends, whether they directly realize it or not.

One reaction a person might take from this is a desire to simply withdraw from all of it. I know I feel kind of strange thinking of my daughter going to a friend’s house for a slumber party and then having the host of that party shilling for some random consumer product to my daughter in an environment where she feels safe and relaxed and has probably let her guard down. It’s the “guard down” aspect that worries me. I think Schor says it well on page 78:

But friendship is important precisely because it is insulated from commercial pressures. It is considered one of the last bastions of noninstrumentality, a bulwark against the market values and self-interested behavior that permeate our culture. It’s part of what we cherish most about friendships. And that’s precisely why the marketers are so keenly interested in them.

What’s the solution to all of this nonsense? Point it out to your kids. Educate them. It’s pretty evident that normal interaction with society, even if you keep television out of the picture, will result in marketing efforts targeting both you and your kid. The best way to respond is to be prepared, and the best way to do that is to not isolate your kid. Expose them to the world and teach them to ask critical questions – I know that’s something I’ll strive for as my kids get older. That doesn’t mean you should fire up the ol’ television as soon as the kids get home, but it does mean that a good education in every respect – and that includes consumer education – starts at home.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will be a fun one, covering the fifth chapter, “The Commercialization of Public Schools,” starting on page 85 and ending on page 98.

This is the sixth discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the final portion of the third chapter, starting at the subheading “Pester Power” on page 61.

Trans-Toying
For several pages, Schor discusses the idea that marketers are able to turn basically anything into a toy, making it seem like something fun for a child to play with. Think about it: which would your child rather have, oatmeal that seems like oatmeal or oatmeal that seems like a toy? From page 63:

Trans-toying is most noticeable in the supermarket aisle, where packaged goods companies have gotten ingenious in their attempts to turn what we eat into things kids can play with. Frito-Lay has come up with colored Cheetos, now available in a mystery color version. You have to eat them to see what color your mouth and tongue become. Lucky Charms changes what it does with every box. Quaker Oatmeal contains dinosaur eggs and other hidden treasures. And Ore-Ida has come out with Funky Fries, which are blue, or sugar coated, or cocoa flavored.

This is a pet peeve of mine, one that Born to Buy has just given me a perfect excuse to rant about. If you can’t identify what the food product is and how it’s produced, you shouldn’t be eating it. But even if you lower that standard for yourself, you should never feed this stuff to your kids.

Whenever you put a plate of food in front of your child and in front of yourself, your child is getting more than just energy for the day. They’re getting nutritional building blocks for their growth, a stage in their lives that they’ll never be able to repeat. They’re also getting cues on how they should eat as an adult, because if it’s junk you’re giving them and junk you’re eating, it’s junk that they’ll believe is good. Actions speak louder than words.

Sure, maybe you think carrots are atrocious and you’d rather eat a Mickey D’s double cheeseburger. That’s still no excuse to put chocolate-flavored french fries in front of your kid. Read what’s on the ingredients label before you give it to your child – if you wouldn’t serve a great big plate full of one of the ingredients to your child, why would you give it to them at all?

Michael Pollan sums up a great eating philosophy in just seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By food, he’s referring to actual real food, not high fructose corn syrup or whatever ungodly ingredient is used to make Cheetos stain your tongue blue.

A Misunderstanding of Wealth
On page 64, Schor really nails one particular problem with rampant consumerism in America:

Other research has found that people who watch more television have pronounced biases in their perceptions of how wealthy Americans are, because television disproportionately shows wealthy and upper-middle-classs lifestyles. Heavy viewers think that affluence is the norm, vastly exaggerating the proportion of the population with swimming pools, maids, and other luxuries.

In other words, television paints wealthy and upper-middle-class lifestyles as the norm and heavy watchers believe that it is the norm. The people on television become the Joneses to catch up with.

I read this portion of Born to Buy on a Friday morning, so just to test it out, I went downstairs and flipped through every channel that I thought a teenager might stop on. I saw a show about a $10,000 birthday bash for a four year old girl (Party/Party on Bravo), a “documentary” about Angelina Jolie’s life (True Hollywood Story on E!), a show about models infighting with each other (America’s Next Top Model on MTV), a show about a woman getting a $6,000 makeover (Style Her Famous on style.), a sitcom about a family with a butler living in Bel-Air (Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, on TBS), and two different channels showing music videos, each depicting individuals wearing more gold and diamonds than I’ve ever seen in my life.

Regardless of your feelings on the entertainment value of these programs, they all focus in on a lifestyle that is above the financial capacity of almost everyone in the viewing audience. If you watch such programs over and over again, your sense of “normal” begins to reset.

It makes sense why luxury products will pay for product placement on shows. If you see show after show where people are driving a shiny, expensive car, you’ll begin to see that car as normal. If you see everyone drinking bottled water, you begin to see that as normal. If you see everyone listening to an iPod, you begin to see that as normal.

I’m not claiming people are stupid by any means. Most people can pretty clearly identify what’s going on in an individual situation. The problem is when you see it over and over again – it begins to ever so slowly shape your sense of normal.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the whole fourth chapter, “The Virus Unleashed,” starting on page 69 and ending on page 84.

This is the fifth discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the second portion of the third chapter, starting at the subheading “Kids Rule: Nickelodeon and the Anti-Adult Bias” on page 51 through the subheading “Pester Power” on page 61.

Since the last discussion, I spent a lot of time thinking about the idea of parents living vicariously through their children. I know personally of several examples of this – parents who are permissive with their children and buy their children lots of things because the parent never had these opportunities as a child.

I see where these parents are coming from. They’re looking back at their own childhood and trying to perceive the inadequacies there as an idea of how to improve as a parent. They look back on their own missed experiences and decide that their child will be exposed to those experiences, and they feel personal joy when they see what their child is gaining.

From my perspective, the real filter here isn’t whether you’re giving your child all the opportunities you never had, but whether you’re working to open up the right kind of opportunities. Giving your child an iPod simply because you would have loved one when you were a kid doesn’t really help them become a stronger person, but spending a week with them in the countryside of a foreign nation and exposing them to new cultures in a way you dreamed of as a child can change their world.

Anyway, on with some more thoughts on Born to Buy.

Where Kids Rule, Adults Are the Enemy

On page 54, Schor writes:

Industry insiders and outsiders confirm the antiadultism in much of today’s youth advertising. As one marketer explained to me: “Advertisers have kicked the parents out. They make fun of the parents … We inserted the product into the secret kid world … [It's] secret, dangerous, kid only.” Media critic Mark Crispin Miller makes a similar point: “It’s part of the official advertising world view that your parents are creeps, teachers are nerds and idiots, authority figures are laughable, nobody can really understand kids except the corporate sponsor. That huge authority has, interestingly enough, emerged as the sort of tacit superhero of consumer culture. That’s the coolest entity of all.”

A while back, I saw an ad for Verizon DSL that really stuck under my skin for a while. In it, a young girl is using the internet to look at a website. Her father attempts to be involved with her learning experience, but he is basically blown off for not being adept at it.

This ad is targeting a mix of people, but it reinforces the idea that a parent is a doofus and that the child is better off without his “interference.” The child is seen as being intelligent and the unintelligent parent is seen as little more than a distraction.

I personally think the ad is fairly humorous, but the underlying implication is there, and it’s repeated in ad after ad after ad. Children seek acceptance and a sense of being valued by adults, and this type of ad caters perfectly to it. The child is seen as equal or superior to the parent with the aid of the product.

If you watch Nickelodeon or The Disney Channel for very long, you’ll see lots of ads with this theme: kids are smarter or cooler than parents or teachers. In one isolated ad, it’s an interesting gimmick – in enough ads, it becomes a reinforced stereotype.

This is, to me, one of the most compelling reasons to limit your child’s television exposure. If my child goes downstairs to watch Hannah Montana, this type of ad is something they’ll see several times. On an individual basis, a child might be able to discern what’s really going on, but with lots of different ads using lots of different angles to reinforce that idea, I’m not surprised that children with a lot of television exposure would seek an antagonistic relationship with their parents.

My solution is as usual: spend a lot of time with my kids away from the television. I’d rather go out in the yard and toss the football around with my son or try to teach my daughter how to do a cartwheel than do something by myself while they watch the latest offering from Nickelodeon. Which of those two experiences reinforces a positive parent-child relationship – and which one reinforces a negative one?

Dual Targeting
A significant portion of this section focuses on dual targeting, a phenomenon where ad campaigns target both parents and children by highlighting different aspects of a product. Schor gives my favorite example on page 59:

Another example of this strategic thinking is Alpha-Bits. The regular version is targeted to moms, because the letters are seen as educational and beneficial for kids and it has less sugar than Alpha-Bits with marshmallows, which is targeted only to kids.

For those unaware, Alpha-Bits is a cold breakfast cereal where the individual pieces of cereal are shaped like letters. As a kid, I have vivid memories of my older brother spelling out obscene messages using Alpha-Bits in his cereal bowl.

It’s easy to see where this goes: the makers of Alpha-Bits is happy if either the parent or the child goes into the cereal aisle and picks out an Alpha-Bits product. So they simply make a “mom” version and a “kid” version and market each to that audience, focusing specifically on the attributes attractive to each. The version for moms is a pretty healthy cereal and a potential educational opportunity – seems good. The version for kids is a marshmallowy sugary fun time – seems good.

This happens over and over again. McDonald’s targets kids with their Happy Meals and parents with their salad line and burgers. Kool-Aid tells parents that it’s an inexpensive way to get Vitamin C and shows kids partying with Kool-Aid Man. (How can I compete with Kool-Aid Man, really? He’s big and red and bursts through walls!)

For me, this is a prime reason to get kids involved in your buying process as early as you can. If you can’t explain to them exactly why you’re buying a product, then why are you buying it? Let them see exactly how you shop – and force yourself to live up to that standard that you want to preach. Actions speak far louder than words.

The next discussion, coming in three days, will cover the final portion of the third chapter of Born to Buy, starting at the subheading “Pester Power” on page 61 through the remainder of the chapter.