Marketing Food to Children

In 2006, approximately $1,618,600,000 was spent on marketing food and beverages to American children and adolescents. Of this amount, $870 million was spent on targeting just children.

Company’s marketing tactics incorporate the idea of presenting one consistent image, everywhere. A character in a television spot appears on the box in the grocery store, this same character is on posters in restaurants and popping up in ads on the internet. The big idea is to create a friendly face for the brand, most often through the use of a mascot, then place that mascot everywhere children are bound to be. Studies have shown that people are comfortable with what is familiar to them, the same goes for children. If a child sees a friendly, familiar face on a box of cereal, the same face that appeared during commercials during Saturday morning cartoons, they are more likely to want that product.

Marketing tactics such as these would seem more ethical to me if they were promoting healthy foods. Children are so impressionable at a young age that it seems wrong to manipulate them into wanting innutritious foods, especially when they are so young that they have not yet learned what nutrition even is.

I hope to see companies that produce nutritious foods taking a note from the junk food book. If healthy foods are promoted just as often and in the same places as unhealthy foods, children stand a better chance of eating right. If this idea is successful, when a child sees Coco Puffs in the lunch line, they will pass over them for a more nutritious option.