Marketing To Children

Beware the Plot of Positive Marketing

We live in a world where corruption is evidently present in the business practices of big corporations, especially the ones who market to minors. The level of deception they implement into their advertisements makes you think about the irony of promoting your product to an audience with little to no means of purchasing it. Yet the amount of influence these children have on their cash carrying parents is so immense, it is almost as if they are in on the venality.

While exploring the ethical issues of marketing to children, most would agree that it seems a bit perverse to prey upon the delicate and intimate relationship between a parent and a child. Instinctually, parents protect and provide for their children.

It is referred to as the power of pestering since children pester their parents to buy them various products. Unfortunately, children cannot understand the deception of marketing. According to Sharon Beder, children cannot understand the intent of marketing to manipulate people, and they even struggle to differentiate between reality and what is portrayed in ads, making it undeniably unethical to market to them. Although, if we are going to consider children’s ability to comprehend this blatant trickery, then we cannot forgo exploring the parents role. Parents are allowing corporations to influence their children and then allowing their children to influence them as well. Since parents have all the purchasing power, they really are the power players in the equation. They could easily put a stop to it because without sales and profit, corporations would go out of business. It seems like such an easy social issue to fix, but it has continued for decades. It is distressingly likely that parents have also been

They want people to believe that positive messages can be spread through deceptive marketing. But, positive pestering power is absolutely oxymoronic, as noted in Benedy, because it is a form of bargaining for these corporations so that the end result is the same - profit. The corporations want to sell their products and line their pockets. Suggesting that they can accomplish this in a positive way by also persuading kids “to eat healthy, participate in sport, and read books” (Benedy) is merely a bargain that purposes it is ethically acceptable to market to children so long as the child is persuaded into positive behaviors in the process. It seems absurd that parents or governing agencies would allow for such a trade-off. Even if we concede to the evidence touted in Brooks-Gunn that indicates positive social change can result from ads promoting awareness, we still have to evaluate the danger of allowing corporations to decide what is valued as positive social change and whether we can trust ads promoting social changes when the only goal from the marketers is to make money. From a standpoint of social behavior, it can be encouraging to know that children can be influenced into more positive lifestyle habits, since there does not seem to be ethical conflicts with ads that pester kids to promote