October 15, 2004 | Volume 1, Issue 2
Born To Buy--The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture by Juliet Schor
(Scribner, New York: 2004)
We work longer than anyone else, we save less, and too many of us have claimed bankruptcy. We are Americans. We live in a land of 46,000 shopping centers; we buy 48 new pieces of wearing apparel per person per year (the adults among us, that is). We each have a TV set upon which we view thousands of commercial messages each year.
“So what?” you ask. Yes, we work hard, and we like to spend our money. We live in a capitalist society; we are defined by the things we make and consume. We’re also able to discriminate among those intrusive TV, radio and magazine ads and make rational decisions.
But what is happening to our children in the midst of all this consumerism? Do we know? If you believe Juliet Schor, author of Born To Buy—The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, our children are the important new targets of this lust for business growth, and we are blind to it. “The architects of this culture . . . have now set their sights on children,” she says in her recent and well-received, third book. Where children were once “bit players” in our consumer society, Schor now sees kids and teens “at the epicenter of the American consumer culture.”
In her 275-page book, Schor, an economist by training and professor of sociology at Boston University, tells us that these days, “Kids’ tastes drive market trends.” Most unfortunately, we adults, caught in a cycle of working and spending, don’t recognize it. We are too busy on our computers, shopping 24/7.
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, agrees with Schor. “We worry about so many dangers to our children,” she writes. “Drugs, perverts, bullies—but seldom notice the biggest menace of all: the multibillion-dollar effort aimed at turning our kids into oversexed, status-obsessed, attention-deficit little consumers.”
Schor identifies the young as the market’s “first adopters,” the “avid users,” for example, of new technology. These kids have “passionate consumer desires” and are the most closely tethered to products and brands. She tells us that kids can recognize brand logos by 18 months, that by age 2 they ask for products by brand name, and that by first grade they can evoke 200 brands. We learn that 40% of teens are tied to car brands and 30% of parents ask their children for advice on car purchases. In fact, she cites brand guru Martin Lindstrom who says that 80% of all global brands require a “tween strategy.”
Yes, according to Schor (and Lindstrom), “It’s a war out there.” $15 billion, Schor says, “is being spent in advertising and marketing to children,” particularly to the 52 million children aged 12 and under. These marketers and advertisers know that children between the ages of 12 and 19 spent $170 billion in 2002. Can’t you see them rubbing their greasy, greedy little hands together, strategizing in their darkened war rooms, “targeting” our youth with “collateral” materials?
Who is to blame for this phenomenon? Blame our culture, the one that is producing fat kids with ADD, electronic addiction, high anxiety and increased drug and alcohol dependence. Blame those kids with a “gatekeeper” mother who is out working longer hours so she can buy more. Or blame no one, especially if this scenario doesn’t describe your kids, the ones who aren’t watching Nickelodeon or network television or listening to rap and hip hop on any one of hundreds of radio stations.
I agree with Schor that marketers have found the children’s market and that they have become more sophisticated at fashioning messages that will appeal to kids. But as a father of two boys aged 3 and 5, I have little evidence that they are driving a market. Certainly they do not greatly influence the purchasing decisions of their mother and me. I do not hear them recite brand names or brand preferences, despite the fact that they’ve watched enough Sponge Bob Square Pants and Dora the Explorer to qualify as experts.
Do marketers purposefully and willfully, even maliciously, target kids? Do they have, as Schor tells us, terminology (i.e., KAJOY: Kids Are Getting Older Younger) especially reflective of their purpose? Are marketers “growing bolder year by year?” Of course! As a person who spent years in marketing, I did my level best to identify markets, attract their attention to my company’s services, create interest in the services, and move audiences to purchase. But I knew that the service had to fit the needs of the audience and I found over and over that if it did not serve some purpose to the audience, they would not buy the message or the service.
Schor argues that children cannot discriminate and are, thereby, “scarfing down chips and soda, driving their parents crazy about those hundred dollar sneakers.” I will agree that this happens in many homes, for any number of reasons. And I also agree with her final conclusion that parents must take final responsibility by not only empowering their children but by teaching them so that they do not become seduced by the consumer culture into which they have been born.
Schor has written a very important book, one whose message should be translated into a simpler tract for the many parents who worry about their children’s health, both physical and mental, but who do not have the time to read her long and scholarly work. She is right in warning us of the dangers posed by corporate Trojan Horses such as Channel One, which has entered our children’s classrooms with an audience size second only to the Super Bowl and of great interest to the marketers of the world. We must be vigilant; we must be involved, we must teach our children the meaning of caveat emptor.