“Kid Kustomers”
No matter where children are or what they are doing they’ll always find some sort of advertisements. It can be when their casually watching television, reading a magazine or just playing games on their computer. Advertisements are different forms of communication whose purpose is to make their product known to the public. Marketers aren’t partial to certain people; they target anyone and every age group, but recently there has been an upsurge of advertisements aimed towards children. In Eric Schlosser’s article, Kid Kustomers, he demonstrates how child advertising has boomed by the tactics marketers use to get children to want and demand certain companies’ products. The big boom in child advertisement occurred in the …show more content…

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development states that during the ages of 2-4, “Kids cannot yet manipulate and transform information in logical ways, but they now can think in images and symbols.” This means it is a lot easier to get young children to like and trust any advertisement they see, because the persuasive intent of the advertisement is not visible to them yet. Another effective marketing technique was the idea of developing “children’s clubs.” Schlosser shows that children’s clubs can boost businesses, explaining how “the creation of a Burger King Kids Club in 1991 increased the sales of children’s meals as much as 300 percent.” The reason for this success was because having a kids club gave children a sense of belonging and status.
Some Federal and government agencies started to feel that companies were taking advantage of children’s naiveté’s. When companies began to ask children for personal information online, the federal agency decided to put a stop to it. This brought on the