From Tastes Great to Cool: Children's Food Marketing and the Rise of the Symbolic

The scope and scale of current marketing practices are surveyed, and the growing use of symbolic appeals that are central in food brands to themes such as finding an identity and feeling powerful and in control are surveyed.

Abstract

It is now well recognized that the United States is a consumer-driven society. Private consumption comprises a rising fraction of GDP, advertising is proliferating, and consumerism, as an ideology and set of values, is widespread. Not surprisingly, those developments are not confined to adults; they also characterize what some have called “the commercialization of childhood.” Children are more involved than ever in media, celebrity, shopping, brand names, and other consumer practices. At the core of this change is children's growing role as independent consumers. In recent years, children's access to income has risen markedly, and they have gone from being purchasers of cheap plastic goods and a few select food items (e.g., candy) to being a major market for a diverse set of goods and services, including foodstuffs. Unofficial estimates suggest that children aged four to twelve spent a reported $6.1 billion in purchases from their own money in 1989, $23.4 billion in 1997, and $30 billion in 2002, for a total increase of four hundred percent.