Mandatory Marketing To Children And Underage Children Essay

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Since 1963, Ronald McDonald has been the spokesperson of the multibillion dollar fast food franchise McDonald. For over 50 years, the clown figure brought billions of revenue to the corporation by relating him to the underage children. Today, statistics shows that 47 percent of adults are in favor of Ronald McDonald retiring and 32% of them are strongly in favor of it even though most of them do not see the harm of the advertising strategy (Andrzejczyk 216). Corporate Accountability International believes that its time for the clown to retire in able to end its predatory marketing to underage children. The essay “Predatory Marketing to Children and Underage Youths” of Cynthia Andrzejczyk explores the success of Ray Kroc in making McDonald a multibillion dollar fast food corporation through Ronald McDonald. The success was owed to the creation of advertisement strategies that directly targeted the underage population. The creation of Ronald McDonald as the face and promoter of McDonald to the bombardment of its face in television, movies …show more content…

It is a belief that underage children do not have the intellectual capacity to rationalize their decisions. This is the reason why the Supreme Court believe that a restriction in advertising is essential (qtd. in Andrzejczyk 216). While children watch commercial featuring Ronald McdDonald, they would only see a clown having fun eating a hamburger. It would be difficult for children due to their age to recognize the negative ramification of eating unhealthy diet. The corporation advertisers exploited this vulnerability and use it as an advantage to market to children. They relied on children to nag and whine to their parents, and in a way, pushing them to advertise eating unhealthy hamburgers to their family. In fact, as mention above, children were responsible for 670 million dollars purchased made by a family (215). It is nearly thirteen times higher than the sales from children

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