Ossigeno

98 99 O d i Ó l o s O f o r Ó l o s #O for Ólos curated by Serena Valentini all that glitters. commodification of childhood through the 4P of marketing T here are flows crossing us like never before. We constantly handle them and, like it or not, we trigger and use them in a continuous exchange. We are talking about information. Those that we use are incoming, those concerning us are outgoing. Marketing has a voracious appetite for information flows; children and adolescents are its favourite channel, so much to made it necessary the commodification of childhood 4 definition. Food sector – which, given its primary importance, owns strong interests in this regard, with its constant look for more immediate ways to grab consents and customers, highly taking into account the future too – is not detached from such voracity. In food industry, the most desirable target is precisely that of children and adolescents, scanned and analysed for this purpose in a clinical diagnosis style. They represent both a daily subject to observation by advertising companies for examining tastes and aspects that, through simple interviews, might not emerge, and either a final goal and a tool for reaching adults, influencing their choices by passing through main door, their children, due to their high achievability during development phase. Children and teenagers even become collaborators for several market research institutes: common in the States, there are focus groups formed by young people to which companies turn to evaluate and baptize their products and, wherever possible, to gather deeper and more introspective information about their preferences. There are also consultant teenagers, called trendspotters , who keep big brands constantly informed about main trends, providing suggestions and testing new products, compensated by gifts that tend to confirm their brand’s perception as a celebrity. That is the meaning of commodification of childhood , phenomenon for which children are subjected to the law of the market and trained in the role of consumers, since the involved sectors are fully aware that only by deeply analyzing this crucial age range, and learning its tastes, marketing world can succeed in implementing winning strategies, in order to influence their behavior. A flow of incoming and outgoing information on which focus is necessary, in view of an individual holistic evolutionary approach, as of a prompt intervention in terms of mediation capability. Children and adolescents, naive actors because of their unripe inability towards a deep evaluation of what they see, are although considered by marketing immediate consumers, as they are more capable than ever before of both a greater money supply as of an autonomous buyer power. Even their dimension of future consumers is all but underestimated, keeping in mind that « the very young consumers of today are the adult consumers of tomorrow 4 », therefore it is necessary to socialize them to consumption in order to enhance their brand loyalty . Thus younger ones are constantly being bombarded by advertising messages of all kinds, starting from their birth, with the sole objective of obtaining this kind of loyalization as soon as possible, in them creating a positive attitude towards the brand. An attitude capable of influencing their future consumption choices as of ensuring a constant and permanent purchase, « from the cradle to the grave 5 ». Another intrinsically commercial, as unconscious, requirement owned by young people resides in being an easily influenceable category, often having a strong driving effect on the spending decisions of the whole family. Even if wallet is opened by mom and dad, key players in the act of acquiring are generally children, rightly considered mediators of adult consumption. Advertising, unlike them, is perfectly aware of such a sneaky mechanism, directly reaching out to them not only to promote specific childcare products, but also those aimed at adult consumers. Because of their high exposure to television, of new technologies’ greedy use and interaction with their mates, children and adolescents are fully aware of products and brands on the market, as well as they are more related to trends, often giving suggestions to their uninformed parents who actively ask for their advice: it is indeed known that children exercise on parents a remarkable pressure regarding specific products’ or brand’s choice, partly induced by a certain tendency of adults to youthfulness – that is, an aspiration in looking or staying young, in desiring to be updated by their children about what is trendy, about the latest fashion. An additional unconscious juvenile requirement, widely known and exploited by neuromarketing, is pester power, the ability to torment : when children see a specific brand’s product, they recognize it and insistently request it from parents who, sooner or later, surrender 4 Nadia Olivero, Vincenzo Russo, Psicologia dei Consumi , ed. McGraw-Hill Education, 2013 – the volume has partially been translated in english by the same author, Nadia Olivero, in Consumer Psychology: an introduction , ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2017 5 Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation. The dark side of the all-American meal , ed. Houghton Mifflin, 2001