Consumer Kids: How Big Business is Grooming Our Children for Profit
by Ed Mayo and Agnes Nairn
Constable, £8.99
THIS is a heady work railing against the growing menace of junk food, junk drink, junk mail, junk entertainment and junk culture. The no-nonsense agenda for the book is illustrated on the front cover – a child behind a barcode designed to look like a prison window – and the book itself makes no bones about its intention to expose the commercial practices that see children from very young to teenagers as crucial players in a gold-rush marketing battle for their hearts, souls, minds and money.
In a thoroughly researched and persuasive thesis, we are steered through the influences of pester power and peer group pressure and the opportunities therein for marketing manipulation that exploits kids’ desire to be cool and exposes the weakness of parents who give in too easily to their demanding children.
To marketing campaigners kids are wonderful sales people, powerful conduits to other children. When the children’s market is estimated at £99 billion companies, or child catchers in this book’s terminology, want to feast on lucrative slices of a profitable cake.
The paraphernalia of modern technology – mobile phones, internet, MP3 players, multi-channel television – and slick reality, fashion and lifestyle media outputs give advertisers many pipelines to young people in particular. It’s a marketing world spiced up with sexual connotations and the creation of desires to be as rich, successful and perfect as the stars of movies, television, music and sport. Kids are suckered in and companies, in their quest to win more customers and increase market share, see the young market as a legitimate target for business security and longevity.
Consumer Kids is littered with alarming information. For example, children’s bedrooms have been transformed from places to sleep into hi-tech, intensive media bedsits. About a quarter of each child’s day is devoted to switching on and interacting with machines from mobile phones to TVs and computers, and the commercial world dominates children’s time more than ever.
The enticing worlds of fashion, sugar-rich foods, social networking websites, gadget obsession, celebrity exposure and product endorsement and life itself, as a kind of eternally happy theme park, are it seems ripe for exploitation. Kids are vulnerable, companies know it and see endless opportunities.
This is an important book to be read with an open mind but it will be impossible for business managers not to feel rather soiled and guilty after such an intellectual drubbing. Consumer Kids gives us something substantial to chew on and pokes away at our collective conscience, giving us the choice to surf along with consumerism, to sink beneath its relentless tidal wave or to fight it tooth and nail in the interests of future generations’ responsibility and salvation.
Joe Cushnan
