Marketing people say that the big sell to the tinies began for them with the invention of the child-carrying supermarket trolley. Their most powerful weapon in the fight to sell is sitting right under the nose of the parent, bored, seeking attention and absolutely bound to spot anything whose packaging features a logo or a cartoon character seen regularly on the television. But many of the items in these packages are foods and soft drinks with high fat and sugar contents which are not particularly good for children.
It takes until the age of about six for the young consumer to understand the difference between an advert and a programme on the television, and even longer to appreciate what the ad is trying to do. Even then, the child does not necessarily care. Keeping in with the peer group is much more important at that age, and marketing managers are well aware of this. If they can start a craze with, for example, collectable toys given away in packets of cereal or crisps, sales of that product will probably go through the roof.
Such marketing is aimed at a very impressionable age group, and although companies claim that it is responsibility of parents to monitor what their children eat, drink or play with, it may be that the time has come for a little more social responsibility to be shown by those people who are exploiting children for their own financial gain.
