By Amy Mills
Anyone who spends any time with children cannot help but be aware of the prominent role that brands, advertising and marketing ploys play in their lives. Hearing my younger siblings insisting that they want a certain cereal simply because of the "cool" cartoon characters featured on its packaging has led me to question the morality of this type of marketing.
My own, private debate went office-wide recently, when we heard of Disney's plans to begin selling a new, branded mobile phone this June, specifically targeted at children and their parents. While the special security features of the phone are being promoted to the parents, the success of this latest product from Disney will no doubt be based on the concept of 'pester power', where children harass their parents until they agree to enter into long-term and costly phone contracts. A spokesperson from Sprint, the network supporting the Disney-branded mobile phone service, has said that Disney Mobile could be targeting children as young as 8 years old, and that the organisation 'is fully capable of focusing on that market and causing an acceleration' of growth. Well, there's something to boast about!
In other areas of life, communicating with children is vitally important eg. health, anti-bullying, and road safety campaigns. And there are, of course, people who argue in favour of targeting consumer marketing campaigns at children - living in a consumer society as we do, they believe it is important that children are given the opportunity to develop the ability to detect and assess marketing messages.
This makes sense as long as companies do so ethically, and don't merely set out to take advantage of children's natural naivety in order to boost their profits. But in the case of Disney, I don't buy its parent-friendly branded phone spiel - it's a money-making tactic, pure and simple, and one that many children, and their parents, will unfortunately buy into.
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