With tweens more advanced in their knowledge of technology, parents are increasingly turning to them for advice. And tweens don’t need to stamp their feet to get what they want—instead they negotiate their way to some of the family’s key purchases, including cars.
When Toyota in Japan recently launched a comic strip featuring Toyota cars in the storyline, parents were outraged by the blatant attempt to market directly to children.
The manga comic—aimed at the impressionable tween market of six-13 year-olds—was created by UK magazine publisher Haymarket and distributed in Australia with Pacific’s tween magazine K-Zone.
The stars of the comic strip were Akira and his dad, a Toyota chief engineer who is working on a futuristic new vehicle—the ‘i-unit’—to promote Toyota’s innovation and sponsorship of the 2005 World Expo in Japan.
The move supports 2003 research from Brandchild that found 30% of children say their parents ask them for advice when choosing a family car.
But Toyota’s marketing chief in Australia, Peter Evans, says the comic went too far as a promotional strategy.
“We don’t sell cars to people under 17 so the only thing we’re interested in doing is driving brand preference for late teens as they come into the car market. We’re certainly not into pester power and advertising to 12 and 13-year-olds,” Evans says.
Japanese press lambasted Toyota for targeting tweens, which Evans agrees is inappropriate for high-priced adult products like cars.
“Our target is 17 plus. K-Zone is targeted at eight, nine and 10 -year-olds so we don’t regard that as good business practice. It’s not a good way to spend our money and it’s probably not ethical considering the higher profile of cars. It’s not McDonalds, it’s not toys—a car is a $15,000 minimum investment which has rational and emotional components.”
Tweens may not be old enough to buy cars, but they’re worth $4bn to the Australian economy, influencing family purchase decisions from home entertainment to holidays.
Family psychologist, Evelyn Field, believes social changes like the rise in duel-income families has seen buying power shift towards children.
“You’ve got busy parents working long hours who don’t have the same control over their kids. The discipline systems are far more lax in families these days,” Field says.
“So you’ve got kids able to verbalise what they need, and having more confidence because they’re less restricted than earlier generations.”
She believes consumerism is the new religion, which is creating brand-conscious children.
“Our society has become more materialistic. Instead of going to church and having your Sunday roast, people go shopping.”
She says during the tween years, children are in a “tribal” mindset, where they need to belong, which makes them easy prey for marketers.
“Young people at this age are pretty insecure about who they are, therefore it’s really important for them to be accepted by a peer group. They just want to be in. It’s quite easy for marketers to appeal to [those] vulnerabilities,” Field says.
Obesity expert, Professor Boyd Swinburn, says the 12 food advertisements Australian children are exposed to every hour puts corporate wealth before children’s health.
“We need to ask whether children are fair game for advertisers, especially in the middle of an obesity epidemic. The Code of Practice is rather a waste of time. What we need to do is strengthen the regulations and the monitoring,” Swinburn, who is a spokesperson for The Parent’s Jury, a network of 400 parents lobbying to curb junk food ads, says.
But has parent permissibility lost its power with so many children involved in shopping?
Publisher of youth titles for Pacific Magazines, Nicole Sheffield, believes tweens have a stronger buying say in families because we’ve raised them to be independent thinkers.
“We’re trying to combat bullies and encourage kids to have a career, a goal, a focus,” Sheffield, who oversees popular tween titles such as K-Zone and Total Girl, says.
A mother herself, Sheffield says the e-generation simply understand and use technology better than their parents, which puts them in the driving seat.
“This generation has always had the computer, the internet, mobile phones. Multimedia is part of their existence—they feel comfortable with it and informed by it, which takes pester power to a whole new level. Kids used to be influencers, but now they’re the opinion leaders.”
Pacific’s research confirms that over 60% of kids under the age of 10 program the DVD in the household.
“Mum and Dad don’t know how to do it. So why are we selling the DVD to them? We should be selling it to the kids,” Sheffield says.
Consumer insights director for MindShare Sydney, Liz Harley, agrees that brands need to consider duel-targeting to stay relevant to the new buying democracy of families.
“Family purchasing decisions like the family home, car and holiday are like a see-saw, with parents on one side and kids on the other. It’s not really about one having complete control, it’s about trying to find democracy,” she says.
MindShare’s discussion of pester power at this year’s Brandchild conference revealed that tweens are using negotiation and reasoning, rather than pestering, to get what they want.
“Tweens are not babies and they don’t have to stamp their feet to get what they want. They’re growing up faster and in many cases the parent is seeking out opinion,” Harley says.
She believes duel-targeting will no longer be a luxury, but a necessity.
“You have to think about a campaign that works on multi-levels and multi-channels,” Harley says.
“Dreamworld realised they needed to have three targets with three different messages and three different creative executions—giving mums, teens and kids a similar message with different twists.”
