Children are an attractive audience to marketers. In Western countries like Australia, about 20% of family consumption decisions can be influenced by children, while China’s revenue on toys and games increased by more than double from 2011 to 2016. This leads to brands’ increasing interest in targeting this potential market.
However, this also creates social and ethical concerns regarding marketing communications reaching vulnerable younger children (younger than 8 years old). This vulnerability is often attributed to a lack of children’s persuasion knowledge (CPK), which is their ability to understand and distinguish between advertising and other targeted content, such as children’s TV shows, and their lower scepticism towards communication messages. Some negative effects of this would be children’s negative behaviour from their choice of brand (e.g., overconsumption of junk food), conflicts with parents, and materialist desires for the advertised brands.
Previous research on the relationship between children’s age, CPK, scepticism, and brand awareness has identified an important influencing factor: brand display magnitude. This refers to how prominently, or nonprominently, the brand is displayed in promotional content, based on a combination of elements including brand location, brand size, motion effect, and audio elements. Researchers who found a positive relationship mainly used prominently displayed brands in their studies, and those who found inconsistent results have tended to reduce the prominence level of brand display. However, no research has tested the difference between prominently and nonprominently displayed brands. Another gap in the literature is that it fails to understand the younger children cohort (younger than 8 years old) who behave and process information differently from older children and adults.
Therefore, this study aims to compare the roles of prominently and nonprominently displayed brands in increasing brand recognition through advertising content targeting children younger than 8 years old. It also adds to the body of knowledge on the role of CPK and scepticism in young children’s brand recognition.
Method and sample
This study consists of a sample of 233 children aged 4-7 years, who came from a mid-sized city in Northern China and participated with signed consent from their parents or guardians. The children first watched a TV advertisement stimulus which included both a prominently and nonprominently displayed brand. The prominently displayed brand is highly visible, larger in size, in a centralised position of the focus, and with engaging retrieval cues. The nonprominently displayed brand is designed as a square-shaped brand logo statically present at the top corner of the screen, with less retrieval cues, less colours, and was static.
After that, the children participated in structured individual interviews. The questions were designed to measure (1) their levels of brand recognition – ability to identify the prominently and nonprominently displayed brand logos; (2) CPK – whether they can distinguish advertising from other programs (movie and TV show) and whether they can identify the source of the advertisement (who made it); and (3) scepticism toward the advertising messages – whether they believed in false claims. Several methods were used to improve the children’s participation, including thumbs up and down for “yes” and “no”, animated pictures, verbal statements etc.. They were also made aware of their right to withdraw at any point and that their answers were not judged.
Key findings
- 89% of children could recognise the prominently displayed brand, while only 13% recognised the nonprominently displayed brand.
- Before testing the hypotheses, the relationship between CPK and scepticism was tested and had a positive result. This means children with more CPK (those who could distinguish advertising and knew the source) tended to be more sceptical toward the false claims.
- Children with higher CPK were less likely to identify the nonprominently displayed brand and more likely to identify the prominently displayed brand, compared to those with less CPK.
- Children who could recognise the prominently displayed brand were more likely to distrust the false claim, but no relationship was found for the nonprominently displayed brand.
- Age (in months) was also found to be an important factor. On average, children who could recognise the nonprominently displayed brand were 4 months younger than those who could not recognise the brand. On the other hand, children who recognised the prominently displayed brand were 6 months older than those who could not. These results align with previous research that showed young children’s dramatic increase in their memory of visualised items (e.g., brand logo in the current study).
- Other variables were also tested, including children’s TV watching time, gender, recent purchase requests, siblings, pocket money, and parents’ education level and annual income. However, these had no significant influence on participants’ brand recognition.
Recommendations
This study has important implications for marketers and policymakers. Results showed that children who possess CPK are more likely to recognise a prominently displayed brand and less likely to recognise a nonprominently displayed brand. This suggests that marketers need to consider younger children’s cognitive ability when designing advertisements, for instance, to use simpler messages when advertising to younger audiences with low CPK.
This research also prompts policymakers to consider the appropriate level of bans and regulations on advertisements for young children, which were based on the understanding that it was bad when children recognise brands. However, it was found that children who can identify a brand are not necessarily less sceptical of the advertising message, which means recognising a brand does not necessarily make them vulnerable. Instead, brand recognition may reflect children’s higher level of learning ability, which was demonstrated to highly correlate with suspicion of false claims in this study.
Moreover, the interesting findings about the impact of age on children’s brand recognition suggest that the age of 5 would be critical to the development of children’s memory of advertising information. This means at this age they will be more aware of, or capable of remembering, brands with more prominent display.
Researcher
More information
The research article is also available on eprints.