During recent years we have seen a tendency towards children being looked upon as independent consumers who to a large extent do not depend on the influence of their parents. This means an increased focus on children's' needs and demands by the development of new products for children. Furthermore, manufacturers of products for children experience both increasing competition on the market and increasing consumer demands. To meet the increasing competition and new consumer demands, tests are carried out at a still earlier stage of product development. The combination of the aspects mentioned above means still larger demands for real co-operation between the company and the test institute. Furthermore, the company and institute have to be more conscious about the elaboration of test material, especially because the test material directly affects or even is determinative for the results of a given test. The subject is illustrated by a case, in which the LEGO Group developed very specific test material. The conclusion is that in future the test institutes must expect that companies make still heavier demands on the institutes' ability to develop test material at a very early stage of the product development and/or the test institutes play a more active role as regards their demands to the companies' test material.
Everyone is aware that the lives of American children in the last decade of the Twentieth Century differ in many ways from those of previous generations, particularly the lives of the famous "Baby Boom" generation. Baby Boomers grew up in the social and economic stability of the period stretching from the very traditional 19 50s to the "Me Decade" of the 1970s. The children who are the subject of this presentation are between the ages of 6 and 17. They were born between 1974 and 1985 a period marked by economic turmoil, rapid change in international relations and continuing evolution in the fundamental attitudes and values of the American population. The world these children confront gives them an outlook which is in some ways extremely different than that of preceding generations. In other ways, these children prove once again that there are some aspects of childhood which are apparently timeless. This presentation examines and describes the attitudes, lifestyles and purchasing habits of American children as consumers. It is based on the findings from the Yankelovich MONITOR r (2,500 personal interviews with adult Americans ages 16 and over, conducted annually since 1970) and the Yankelovich Youth M0NIT0R tm (1200 American youths ages 6 to 17 conducted annually since 1987). Youth MONITOR allows marketers to go to the source itself, the children, to explore, in depth, their understanding of, and attitudes toward, the world today.
As market researchers who specialise in youth research, we are regularly asked by clients if there is a way of predicting future trends among young people before they become mainstream. The broad issue of researching the future in relation to consumer market research has been amply discussed and written about. The youth angle makes this issue even more pertinent, due to the fickleness and unpredictability of children and teenagers, when it comes to their choice and taste in products and brands. To help and advise our clients on how to deal with the issue of researching future trends among young people, we have developed a pro-active model which is based on the Subculture Theory. This paper, therefore, sets out to demonstrate how market research can utilise the Subculture Theory to help identify and understand the emergence of fashions and trends among young people. Before looking at the model and how it operates, we begin by devoting the first section of the paper to our definition of trends and fashions and to explain why they are so important to young people.
This paper describes how Neuro Linguistic Progamming as a technique can be integrated in qualitative research with children to enhance the effectiveness. We propose that this integration leads to more valuable results than generally is expected with regard to pretesting advertising with children from six up to eight years of age. Herewith we take the view that these children could give relevant information, which as a result of development related factors, is hardly accessible with normal qualitative techniques. At the time of writing this paper, research is on its way to demonstrate the above. At the seminar we will present the results.
Twenty years of daily work with 0-25 year-olds ( the new children's market is no longer defined according to the legal age of majority), within their different contexts (family, school, consumption, media,...) lead us to believe that: - Segmentation by age is a logical imperative for Manufacturers, Distributers and Advertisers because, not only is one interested in different products according to whether one is 5 or 20 years old, but also because communication vectors (advertising and promotion) are not the same at different stages of childhood. - other possible criteria of segmentation - either in order to compare girls and boys, or to differentiate families with more cultual-economic advantages from those with fewer - are tending to become less and less meaningful: young people increasingly share the same areas of interest, comparable equipment and similar plans for the future, whatever their sex or family background. - in order to be thoroughly effective, communication to the young must move from the "personal" level to the "fusional" one and must take into account different models of family relationships because these young people continue to live at home much later and are, at the same time, more financially dependent and more culturally autonomous than before. - even if differences exist between different countries which are socio- economically comparable, it is certainly among the young population that internationalisation of attitudes and behaviour is the most marked, influenced by factors which are no longer national: fashion, music, films, etc.
The role of brand names in the language of young consumer s is obvious, and raises various type of questions. For practical reasons , we will divide there into three types. a. what is the basis tor the repercussion on the name brands on the modification of language, and how does this phenomenon affect buying habits. b) What implications do these modifications have for children's perception of their enviroment c) What are the consequences for researchers and manufacturers of products aimed at this sector of the population? With these questions, we aim to open a discussion, in which the following exposition could be modest beginning.
The logic of youth fashion is based on the rejection of Fashion itself. Whether for Benetton, Kookdi, Autour du morule, Chevignon or Naf-Naf... those brands have built themselves, unlike Chanel, St Laurent or Lacroix, a mold-breaking personality which doesn't owe anything to the past, nor to an original stylist or a creative artist... Their success is mainly the result of their communication, which doesn't content itself with the production of a brand image, but endows it with a genuine discourse. The discourse which goes beyond the traditional fashion discourse area, to be in line with the current expectations of youth. Semiology, the study of the signs and their links, is an essential tool to analyze, build and master, these new forms of youth fashion communication. Associated with conclusions of sociology and aesthetics, this peculiar approach allows us to set the problem as follows: the most interesting part of youth fashion communication consists in its different ways of opposition against classical fashion which leads to defining it as an anti fashion. The success of youth communication is above all linked to this skill of setting back youth fashion against the universe of fashion especially now when youth has become the cardinal value of fashion ( versus statutory elegance and pattern elitism ) and when generation gaps are reduced. The challenge of youth communication is the authenticity of the breaking point between the fashion system and youth fashion, bearing in mind that youth communication must be paradoxical. This new paradoxical fashion can be defined by its capacity to get out of the fashion through a discourse which is independent from the clothes themselves, i.e a fashion of the anti-fashion which rejects a fashion of the appearance to stress the importance of the genuineness of a real way of being. A semiological approach allows to decipher these shifts of trends, to define the codes and the expression modes and above all to master the consistency of the sign systems created according to the targeted commercial and marketing development of the trademark.
The JUNIOR '91 RESEARCH is a survey on a specialized collectivity: children. The survey is conducted on a sample of 3.078 children, aged Jun-13 years, and the main aim of the research is to measure readership of magazines for children. But it is also an important opportunity to record some relevant information such as: children exposure to TV programmes, products consumption (food, clothes, durables), ways of spending free-time, money at their disposal, children's influence on family decisions. Children in fact, despite their steady decrease in number, have become a privileged segment of society. Not only children have more money at their disposal, but they buy or receive more products as well. In comparison with the other population segments, children are more interested in technology: video and audio recorders, audio-tapes, video-tapes, disks, videogames and so on, as they have a natural tendency toward new technologies, more than older people. In addition, they have a great influence on family decisions about a lot of consumptions. Fields in which they have more family influence are: clothes, food, spare time activities. In this research, a new method has been used to estimate the average children's influence on family decisions. As far as media research results are concerned , the estimates of readership for the 20 magazines (made according to the method of the national readership) has pointed out the large coverage insured by these vehicles during a longer period of time, but also the relatively limited coverage in the recent period. In any case, a few of these magazines have an enlarged audience (in recent period) , similar to that of the main children TV programmes. On the other end, readers (and overall recent readers) are wealthier than the average of the collectivity and of TV watchers.
If the noise level in America seems to be rising these days, it may be because the baby boomers are in the middle of their own baby boom "echo." Men and women who were born in the years after World War II are now raising their own children. This new generation will eventually number over 70 million, almost as large a generation as the baby boomers themselves. So it's no surprise that the market for products and services designed for children will continue to grow in importance over the next two decades. In addition, today's children are especially important because they affect the economy in three different ways: They buy products and services themselves, they influence purchases in their families, and they represent an important market for the future as they grow into adolescence and adulthood. Therefore, manufacturers and advertisers need to market towards children both as present and as future consumers. Today, children represent a complex, powerful force in the marketplace. We believe the marketers who succeed in this youth market will be those who first have a thorough understanding of the world of the child in American today.
This paper will argue that research into the effects of television advertising directed at childrens markets can benefit from being framed within a perspective guided by a more comprehensive understanding of children's cognitive development. A cognitive-developmental research model has a number of distinct advantages over usual largely descriptive assessments of childrens responses to television advertising. First, it can reveal the increasingly sophisticated evaluations children make of advertising as they grow up, and systematically highlight the kinds of attributes of advertising to which young viewers become increasingly sensitive with age; second, it can identify the stages through which such developments pass and the ages at which they occur, thus offering a new framework for segmenting children other than standard demographic measures; third, it helps to put into perspective (mis)conceptions and concerns about the extent to which children are supposedly vulnerable to undesirable side-effects of exposure to television advertising. The first part of the paper will describe a framework for the analysis of childrens psychological responses to television advertising and substantiate it with a review of psychological and communications research from academic literature. The second part will present previously unpublished data from qualitative research with small groups of children aged between seven and 15 years.
Today's television programmes are product -and not market- orientated. In creating programmes "what kind of product?" is a question more often asked than "what kind of children?". Market-orientation is a critical factor in success, especially when related to the speed of change in television. Nobody can be sure that today's children want to watch yesterday's programmes. Their tastes evolve rapidly and continuously: schedulers must take this into account. Television which is removed from reality, which loses sight of viewers' tastes and daily life-styles, or which is too highfy defined in character for children, is television which risks being left behind. The life-cycles of television products are becoming shorter and shorter. The problem, then, is not so much deciding what kind of television is "right" for children, according to the "adult", "grown-up", pedagogical/sociological approach, so much as understanding what kind of children watch television today and how. The starting point in making children's programmes must be the behaviour of children and their parents. The objective of identifying the segmentation of the public on the basis of consumer behaviour leads to making non-segmented television. The television market is less and less segmented because everybody watches everything: adult and children's viewing patterns are increasingly similar. Children are watching more and more programmes for adults and together with adults, seeing television across the whole range of time-slots (the afternoon is no longer the central viewing time). At the same time, adults are increasingly disposed to watch children's programmes, together with children.