Main target: children                 

Marketing and advertising tricks are well received by children. They are less able than adults to fully understand the purpose of advertising – to persuade and to ultimately sell a product.

Marketers also target children and teenagers because of the:

             money they have to spend

             influence they have over their parents spending – pester power

            money will they will spend as adults – brand loyalty.

Junk Food Generation, a previous CI research report, shows that children believe TV adverts to be informative and enjoy watching them – 73% of Pakistani children claim to love TV adverts!

And what about parents?

Whilst the ultimate responsibility for providing food for children lies with parents, the aggressive marketing aimed at children is undermining their efforts to provide a healthy diet.

Parents may be telling their children to eat healthy food but food companies are telling children that unhealthy products are desirable to eat.

Moreover, neither CI nor its members have found free toys with a bag of apples or a prize draw with a bunch of broccoli.

In some cases, parents may be unaware of what messages their children are seeing for example on websites and in schools. However, these types of marketing are becoming more and more common and increasingly so in developing countries.

Find out more about...

The impact of unhealthy eating habits
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The campaign