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Branding Kids Starts Earlier Than Ever

AUTH:

LA i

David Suzuki,

David Suzuki

Foundation

 

Would you let your kids play in a swamp?
Odds are, most parents would balk at such
a notion today. After all, a swamp seems so
dirty and teeming with who knows what.
But if not a swamp, what about a forest,
or a creek—even a backyard? What worlds
are children exploring today and what are
they learning from them?

When I was a boy, my playground was
a swamp near my home in southern
Ontario. I spent countless hours there,
catching tadpoles and wading though cat-
tails, delighting at each new discovery. Asa
result, I could easily name dozens of
species of birds, fish, and insects. This was
my world and it shaped who I am today.

But while my world was full of nature’s
delights, today’s children face a world
dominated by consumer delights. Instead
of a real swamp, their world is often “vir-
tual,” consisting more of television, video
games, and the Internet. Each of these
technologies wields tremendous power
and children can learn a great deal with
them. What they learn, however, is not
necessarily what we intend.

Advertising certainly existed when I
was growing up, but it was nothing close
to the saturation levels faced by children
today. In my swamp, there were no bill-
boards. Frogs did not croak “coke.” Birds
did not pull banner ads. The swamp was
not sponsored by an oil company. And I
was blissfully free of the consumer mes-
sages that bombard children in the 21st
century.

So while I learned the names of other
living creatures, kids today are far more
likely to learn the names of various prod-
ucts and popular brands. According to
new research, this constant assault of
brand imagery is reaching our children at
earlier and earlier ages.

A recent study, published in the Journal
of Applied Developmental Psychology, has
found that children as young as two are
now able to recognize common brand
names. Researchers tested some 200

10 | www.theotherpress.ca

 

Dutch children, presenting them with
common logos, such as McDonalds, Nike,
Mercedes, and Cheetos. Most two- to
three-year-olds recognized eight out of 12
logos and the majority of eight-year-olds
recognized 100 percent of them—includ-
ing Camel cigarettes and Heineken beer.

Researchers found that one of the
strongest correlations with higher brand
recognition scores was a child’s exposure
to television. Generally, the more televi-
sion a child watched, the more readily he
or she was able to recognize brands. This
makes sense, given television’s power as a
visual medium.

But the researchers also point out that
their results should be a warning about the
potential for advertising to influence the
most impressionable minds. Advertising
to infants and toddlers is a rapidly growing
trend. Just ten years ago, most marketers
only targeted children over age six. Today,
with the success of toddler-based televi-
sion shows like Teletubbies, researchers say
infants and toddlers have been identified

as a “vital and undeniable target group.”

In fact, the authors argue that mar-
keters have already done their own
research about the cognitive and behav-
ioural effects of advertising on young
children. In most cases, however, the
results have not been made available to
academics or policy makers. In other
words, marketers aren’t just incidentally
targeting some of the most vulnerable
members of society—they are actively tar-
geting them, and then keeping quiet about
it.

Children of the 21st century are grow-
ing up in a world much different than the
one I faced. In some ways, they have more
opportunities than my generation ever did.
But they also face new problems and
threats that we never would have imag-
ined. Given the insidious nature of some
of those threats, maybe a swamp isn’t such
a bad place to play after all.

Take the Nature Challenge and learn
more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

 

 

 

Right Hook
Continued from page 9

first place.

This reality gets lost in the
Canadian obsession over the “big-
“Does

Canada have a wnique culture?” Are

ger” question, namely,
we a culturally distinct nation on the
world’s stage, with our own unique
characteristics, or are we simply cul-
turally inseparable from the
homogenous United States?
Canada’s blind obsession with anti-
Americanism, especially on the part
of this nation’s elites, seems to indi-
cate the latter. We mock what we are
not, rather than celebrate what we
are, out of national insecurity and a
shared unwillingness to accept our
shared identity with citizens of the
US:

That being said, the belief in a
blob-like “American” culture that
sweeps across the entire continent is
equally invalid. Canada and the
United States are alike in a broad
sense, but Seattle is more like
Vancouver than Austin, and likewise
like
Seattle. Powerful regional identities

Austin is more Atlanta than
exist across this great continent,
making the attempt to create coher-
ent and comprehensive definitions
of a “Canadian” or “American”
identity a rather fruitless pursuit. So,
while both the US and Canada do
share a common North American
culture, we are simultaneously divid-
ed by a myriad of provincial, state,
and even municipal cultures that are
inevitable in a continent as massive
as ours. Cohesive national identities
may be possible in small European
nation-states like Belgium, but that’s
simply not the reality in our part of
the globe.

Overall, when we obsess about
culture in our country, it is impor-
tant not to loose track of the bigger
picture. The culture of our society is
all around us, from the candied
apples and corndogs we eat at
Playland, to the Halloween cos-
tumes we wear in October. It is the
limited shopping hours on Sunday
and the diplomas we get on gradua-
tion day. Culture is as much defined
by the mundane routines of daily
life as it is by the flags and slogans of
a political state.

Much of our culture may not be
identifiably “Canadian,” and it may
not be particularly unique, but it is
ours none the less, and I, for one,
will be returning home with a
renewed appreciation for it.

August 10/2005