Family communication and children's consumption behaviour

Good afternoon everybody,

today we are going to focus on family’s role in protecting children from marketing dedicated to them, or better, in educating them to a responsible consumption attitude.

I have found an interesting paper by Gregory M. Rose, David Boush and Aviv Shoham, “Family communication and children’s purchasing influence: a cross-national examination” (2002), in which the authors study the importance of family’s communication process in shaping children’s purchasing power. 

Marketing is always ready to attract and persuade kids: it appears on TV, magazines and it pervades the Web. Even if we fight for making marketing ethical and responsible towards children, it will be impossible, even excessive to prevent firms from targeting them. It is family’s responsibility, too, to instruct children to react in a rational way to marketing messages.

Parents have to make their kids aware of the money’s worth, of product prices and of puffery; they have to learn how to recognize a misleading message and understand that not always a product described as the best and as the one that you definitely have to buy is something that you really need. 

Marketing to children may be unethical, but if parents pamper their kids too much, buying them anything they want, they will facilitate irresponsible marketers’ work.

A lack of family communication often generates spoiled children

A good communication between parents and children is crucial and it usually has two main dimensions – as the authors state: one mainly socially-oriented, related to human interrelationships (based on some dictates, like avoid conflicts, respect the elders and so on), the other one conceptually-oriented, focused on teaching children to think independently and to evaluate all sides of an argument during the communication process. 

Starting from these two dimensions, four communicative patterns have been elaborated:

• laissez-faire: typical of families with a low-quality communication, lacking both of social and conceptual orientation;
• protective: it describes families in which socially-oriented dimension is strong, but the conceptual one is insufficient;
• pluralistic: more focused on the conceptual dimension, less on the social one;
• consensual: both the dimensions are important.

Family communication and a responsible consumption behaviour are often connected

If we consider these dimensions on a scale where the lowest level is laissez-faire and the highest the consensual one, the more we move towards the consensual level, the more our children are conscious about the use of their income.

Usually, children raised in pluralistic and consensual families have more income at their disposal and they are more responsible about their purchasing power, while children in protective and permissive families tend to be more dependent to their parents’ income. 

Which kind of communication do you adopt in your family? Be careful: if you recognize that your communicative pattern is low-quality, remember that it is important to raise independent and aware children, in order not to make them easy targets for irresponsible marketers. 

Carlotta Neuenschwander

Hello Barbie: toy or marketers' spy?

Good morning everybody,

we have already talked about the controversial practice of targeting children, creating products dedicated to them or just trying to attract them through advertising – no matter what type of good marketers are selling. Indeed, marketing for children is massive in food & beverage sector, but a lot of goods are commercialised leveraging on children’s influence upon their parents, such as cars, clothes, software and computers, family trips and excursions and so on. “We’re relying on the kid to pester the mom to buy the product, rather than going straight to the mom”, says Barbara Martino, advertising executive. 

This is potentially dangerous for children’s health – if the promoted item is not safe, as for junk food and soft drinks – or psychology – since this type of marketing induces them to desire something and to feel dissatisfied and marginalized if they do not obtain it. 

Children as the favourite marketers' target

Today’s topic is even more frightening: it is about creating toys which may store information about kids.

Everyone knows Mattel’s Barbie, personally I played a lot with it when I was a child. Getting Barbies dressed, making them travel, decorate their house and, above all, chatting with them. If they had answered me, it would have been great: every kid would like an interactive toy, a playmate always available when your friends are not around.

Today, the interactive Barbie exists: it is called “Hello Barbie” and it has been presented by Mattel on the 16th of February at the 2015 Toy Fair in New York City, but it will go on sale this fall. It is a Wi-Fi connected doll able to answer when kids are talking to her, because it stores information with a cloud-computing system. 

Hello Barbie presented at the 2015 Toy Fair

The problem is clear: these information are in possession of Mattel, for this reason children’s thoughts, emotions, fantasy will be  a sort of information that the company could use for commercial reasons. It is kind of creepy and, immediately, words as privacy violation and children manipulation come to our mind. 

Hello Barbie has been co-created by ToyTalk, and its CEO, Oren Jacob, stated:

«All of ToyTalk's products in market have been designed to meet or exceed the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and have also been independently verified as such by KidSAFE+. While the underlying technology of our products works much like Siri, Google Now and Cortana, ToyTalk products never search the open web for answers. Responses are carefully crafted by our own writing team, and conversations recorded through our products are never used to advertise or market to children or anyone».

According to them, the conversations are only used to developing, testing and improving speech recognition technology and artificial intelligence algorithms, and absolutely not for marketing and advertising. 

Let us assume that this is true: but don’t you find it sinister? These toys are eavesdropping: they listens to our children private thoughts and they store them. When a little girl plays alone with her Barbies, she opens up her heart: she expresses wants, desires, dreams that no one should be able to listen – not even her parents. I believe that also kids need their privacy, and it is really disturbing that people could eavesdrop what children say in their own rooms. 

Hello Barbie may spy kids

The children advocacy group “Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood” has started a campaign against Mattel’s Hello Barbie, called Stop Mattel’s "Hello Barbie" Eavesdropping Doll. They believe that

«Kids using “Hello Barbie” won’t only be talking to a doll, they’ll be talking directly to a toy conglomerate whose interest in them is financial. It’s creepy – and creates a host of dangers for children and families”. 

Clearly, Mattel and ToyTalk may claim that they will not make use of the information provided by their dolls to create customised marketing campaigns, but who knows? And, assuming that it is true, there would still be an ethical issue, wouldn’t it?

I will be really glad to have your opinion about this topic, and to know the position you are going to take when Hello Barbie will be on sale.

Carlotta Neuenschwander

You can't leave your black hat on

Good morning everybody

Today’s topic will be a little bit different from the usual ones, but still related to marketing ethics.

The title of the post may seem you strange, despite the fact that it echoes the famous Joe Cocker’s song: the subject I am going to deal with is black hat SEO.

First of all, what is SEO? As a marketer, it is impossible not to know it, since it is a really hot topic nowadays. SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization: Wikipedia defines it as «the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's unpaid results».

SEO

More easily, we make use of some search engines everyday: the most famous one is Google, but there are others, like Bing and Yahoo. 

As a company – but even as a single individual, if we want to promote ourselves – it is crucial to appear among the first results in order to get more visitors: the goal of web marketers adopting SEO techniques is to get a higher rank in the search results page and to appear more frequently in the search results list. 

“The best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google”, they say: we can easily understand that being on the first page is very important for companies. 

Improving your ranking through SEO techniques

To have a quick and nice explanation, you can watch What Is SEO.

There are various licit SEO techniques: choosing the best keywords – with the aid of tools such as Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, having web analytics in place, creating high-quality contents, using relevant titles and meta-descriptions and so on. 

On the other hand, there are also web marketers who use aggressive SEO strategies, not aimed at attracting the audience, but just search engines, and in a deceptive way. These methods are called black hat from western movies: indeed, bad characters usually wear black hats, while good guys carry white ones.  

Black hat as a symbol of evilness

Black hat SEO techniques exploit the logic of the algorithms upon which search engines are based, trying to cheat them. Common methods are:

• Keyword stuffing, the strategic use of a certain keyword to make the webpage appear pertinent to the content users are searching for (even if probably it is not so).
• Doorway pages, pages without contents, but created to redirect users to other pages.
• Cloaking, the creation of two different web pages, one for the users and one for search engines’ spiders. That is done because the content of the “real” page, the one created for users, is substantially different – sometimes pornographic.
• Link spam, the use of link farms – groups of web sites that all hyperlink to the other members’ website – to gain visibility.
• Hidden text, the creation of invisible contents – in the same colour of the page background, for instance. 

Black hat SEO techniques

We are talking about these techniques because they are an example of unethical web marketing: these people cheat search engines and users at the same time, they are unethical under a stakeholder-oriented approach. 

If I am searching for something on Google, for instance, I am expecting that the first results are the web sites providing the best contents about that topic. With black hat SEO techniques, I can be deceived, since the web sites that make use of them appear among the first results, but they are not qualitative at all. 

Usually, who uses these techniques is someone who aims at a quick financial return through its website, and it is not concerned with a long term perspective; that is why usually Google rates better pages that have been existing for more than one year.

Luckily, search engines usually ban these people, but, before, they have to recognize them as spammers: it may take time, usually sufficient for them to achieve their goals. 

However, these behaviours are not rewarded: it is far better to obtain a long-term competitive advantage through high quality contents, than cheating search engines with deceptive SEO practices. 

That is why, in order to be successful and ethical at the same time, you can't leave your black hat on.

Carlotta Neuenschwander

Marketing to children: a critical issue

Target selection is a critical phase in marketing decision-making process: choosing the right target for your product is the best way to increase sales and to obtain profit. 

You have to select who is the potential customer that you can easily attract and persuade: and who is as sensible as a child?

Indeed, children have always been one of the marketers’ favourite targets: they are too young, innocent and unspoilt by the society to react and refuse the proposed marketing message; they do not have a rational identity that can protect them from an external manipulation.

One could argue that kids do not have purchasing power: false. Even if it is not a direct purchasing power – they do not go shopping by themselves – they exert a strong influence upon their parents’ shopping decisions. Moreover, nowadays, from a certain age they start receiving a little amount of money from their parents. The sum of these two aspects gives them a strong purchasing power, making them attractive preys to marketers’ eyes. 

Marketing to children: children's purchasing power

If the message we are trying to communicate is safe, we can debate about the ethicality of the choice of targeting helpless customers, but, actually, children will not be damaged. According to me, marketers should have the possibility of targeting children, but they must be really careful of the product they are promoting: if it can be dangerous for children’s health, if it boosts unhealthy behaviours, if it embeds violence and sexual innuendo, marketers should be prevented from targeting children.  

One of the biggest industry in which children play a big role in companies’ profits is food & beverages one. This is the field in which marketing to children proliferate: it is easier to tempt children, because they spend more time watching TV compared to adults – who are often at work – and because they get influenced quicker. 

Marketing to children and TV

Moreover, children do not care about diet – as often adults do; for this reason, they may insist with their parents to obtain a certain snack or drink.

Marketing to children and negative influence

Childhood obesity is a pressing health concern in Western countries – especially in the US – and food and beverage marketing often targets children: it is impossible to ignore the connection between these two aspects. 

Free-market supporters claim for self-regulation in this sense, while others think that a government regulation should be required.

I want to stress one particular point that I always underline: consumers may react towards these marketing campaigns, in this particular case parents should be really careful about what their children watch on TV and what kind of advertising hits them. They have to be ready to protect their children from unethical marketing and to boycott firms that show an irresponsible marketing conduct towards them. If they did so, companies would understand that this marketing technique is not profitable at all and they would cease to adopt it.

This is better than any kind of government intervention: public opinion is far stronger than it and, if exerted in an intelligent and proactive way, could be able to stop these behaviours.

Carlotta Neuenschwander

What kind of consumer are you?

Good afternoon everybody,

In the previous posts we have talked about companies’ responsibility of taking ethical marketing decisions. It is true, firms should have a responsible conduct, and it would be beneficial for society and for them as well.

However, today I am going to focus on consumers. What kind of consumer are you? It is also our duty to be careful about marketing campaigns, to recognize unethical marketing techniques, to avoid deceptive advertising and to boycott firms that cheat on us. 

I am trying to figure out some kind of consumers and I want you to choose the category which best fits you – you need to be honest, do not lie to yourself!

Unaware consumer

You are a person with your own interests, but keeping updated is not so important for you. You are not really into reading (books, newspapers or whatsoever). Your main channel of information is TV: you spend enough time watching it and you let advertisements influence you. How you can understand that? When you go to the supermarket, you usually buy products of the most famous brands, without caring too much about health and their production process.

Consumers and unhealthy food

Average consumer

You are better informed, even well-informed in some fields, but marketing is not really your thing. You are not a TV addict and, when you go to the supermarket, you prefer buying products on offer instead of choosing the most popular brands, since your focus is the price. Of course, you trust more famous companies than unknown ones.

Half price offers to attract customers

Aware consumer

You are an informed person, you read newspaper and you navigate the Web to keep you update. It does not mean that you avoid TV, but it is definitely not the only way to obtain the information you need. Advertising influences everyone, but you are not that much persuaded. You take into consideration the quality/price ratio when you do shopping, choosing the products of the firms you trust but also experimenting something new. 

Customers and their focus on the quality-price ratio

Proactive consumer

According to you, shopping is a way to express your beliefs and to change society as well. You keep updated about marketing ethics and you make responsible shopping decisions, preferring more ethical companies than others. You try to fight for your ideals also through your shopping habits: you certainly do not think that changing the world is impossible; you firmly believe that everyone’s decisions could be useful to shape a better world. Health, respect for the environment and ethics are often their main interests. 

When you have a bad customer experience, you complain or you give a negative review on social networks. Vice versa, when you find a firm that satisfies your needs, you become a loyal customer.

Consumers with a preference for healthy products

Clearly, creating these categories means stereotyping a little consumers’ behaviour. I am sure that nobody is always proactive, or always unaware – at least, it is very difficult to reflect exactly the members of these groups. 

What about you? With my post I am neither saying that everyone should be proactive, nor judging unaware consumers. Sometimes, a person does not take into consideration marketing ethics in his/her shopping habits because he/she is more interested in saving money – a totally respectable decision. Of course, if you understand that you are unaware, be careful: try to keep you updated, informed, because this would be useful not just for you as an individual, but for the society in its entirety. 

As I said in the other posts, consumers do have power, which they can exert through their shopping decisions: you cannot claim for a responsible marketing if you are not the first to be responsible. 

Carlotta Neuenschwander

Kellogg's: a virtuous marketing conduct

Good morning everybody,

today I am going to talk about a virtuous example of marketing ethicality: Kellogg’s. 

The company has been awarded with the second position – within the sector food and beverages – in the list “2014 World’s Most Ethical Companies”  by Ethisphere.

Indeed, Kellogg’s built its success on an ethical business conduct and on a values-based culture.

The principles on which Kellogg’s behaviour is based are called K-values, and they are the guidelines of the firm’s interaction with its stakeholders.

Kellogg's principles for a virtuous conduct

According to an ethical point of view, Kellogg’s adopts a stakeholder-oriented approach: it takes into consideration not just its shareholders, its customers and its employees, but the communities in which it operates, health organisations and charities and governments, too. 

Kellogg’s goal is to minimize the negative impact on these groups of interests caused by its business conduct, and at the same time to satisfy stakeholders’ various needs. 

Kellogg’s refuses to please its shareholders at the expense of other stakeholders and aims at building positive, two-way relationships with its stakeholders. 

This objective is the cornerstone of its Corporate Social Responsibility strategy, which defines Kellogg’s ambitions – the marketplace, environment, community and workplace ones. 

Talking about marketing, Kellogg’s aims at meeting customers’ needs, selling them high-quality and healthy products, and at adopting an ethical and responsible marketing conduct. 

One practical example: Kellogg’s Breakfast for Better Day campaign underlines the importance of a healthy breakfast, and the products that Kellogg’s offers in this sense guarantee a balanced nutritional content. The focus of its campaign is fighting hunger, donating cereal and snacks for breakfast to children in need.

Kellogg's Breakfast For Better Days

With this practical case, I want to demonstrate that ethicality and success are not separate worlds: sometimes, marketers think that unethical behaviours may increase their profits, but it could be so just in the short-term. On the contrary, an ethical conduct is crucial to build a strong reputation and a competitive advantage. 

Carlotta Neuenschwander

Deceptive marketing: how to fight it.

Hi readers,

Today I want to talk about a concrete project in the field of marketing ethics, run by the University of Pavia: if you are interested, just have a look at Protect Yourself From Deceptive Marketing Practices.

Universitiamo - logo of the campaigns run by the University of Pavia

This project aims at protecting consumers from irresponsible marketing techniques, especially from those targeting children. Kids are often manipulated by marketing campaigns, consequently inducing parents to buy what advertising tells them to. The project is focused on food & beverages field, since it is one of the main areas in which children are targeted, and one of the most dangerous ones, too. In fact, marketing can promote wrong eating habits and products that are detrimental for children’s health: consumers should be educated, in order to bypass the kind of marketing which promotes these products.

The project is based on:

• a detailed analysis of customers’ eating habits and their exposure to marketing practices
• study of virtuous and vicious marketing cases
• in-depth interviews with experts in the field of irresponsible marketing
• focus groups with parents (shoppers) to identify their problems and needs

Of course, this project needs funds to be enacted, and in a period of economic crisis people may think that spending money on such a project would be useless.

That is wrong: learning how to avoid evil marketing is learning how to spend your money in a better way. Keeping away from treacherous marketing campaigns is crucial, because it prevents you from being exploited by irresponsible marketers, who leverage on your children to reach you and make you one of their consumers. At the same time, choosing virtuous companies induce even irresponsible ones to change their strategy and converge on a more ethical marketing.  

Nowadays, customers do have the power: if your shopping habits are ethical, firms will get more and more ethical as well. 

Carlotta Neuenschwander

Why choose ethical marketing

Hi everybody,

I am a neophyte blogger and I have decided to deal with this topic: why?

I am an Italian business student - at the last year of my master-course in International Business and Economics - and marketing is one of my greatest interests, the area in which I would like to work and in which I am currently serving an internship. 

I am writing my thesis about marketing ethics and I am discovering this intriguing world, which I want to explore, but also promote, since I strongly believe in its relevance. 

For years, firms have been adopting a laissez-faire philosophy - typical of Milton Friedman's school of thought - in marketing and business in general, but now the growing impact of social networks and the increasing power of the public opinion are causing a turnaround. Stakeholders' rights and welfare should be taken into consideration before launching a marketing campaign, since even the smallest irresponsible behaviours may lead people to boycott your firm.  One of the most famous firms in food & beverages sector - the Swiss Nestlé - has been eavily boycotted in 1977 because of its unethical marketing campaign related to breast milk substitutes, especially in LDCs: if you are interested in the topic, just have a look at Nestlé boycott. 

Boycotting campaign against Nestlé unethical marketing

Today, firms are getting more and more involved in ethical issues: for this reason, they are gradually putting ethical marketing as one of their main goals. Virtuous firms' number is increasing, and the organisation Etisphere compiles an annual ranking of the world's most ethical companies. 

So, as a future marketer, I want to stress some aspects in this blog:

• marketing does not mean acting unethically: the old-fashioned idea that marketers are inhenrently evil is definitely surpassed.
• ethicality means profit: someone thinks that acting ethically is equal to charity, but this is definitely not true. Nowadays, having a clean public image makes you profitable, especially because consumers are getting more and more conscious about ethical issues.

Firms, do not forget the ethical side: it is crucial to create a strong and good reputation to attract customers and to make them loyal. 

Carlotta Neuenschwander