To establish the brand more in the difficult marketing segment of children, some extra activities can be organized to get children closer to the idols related to the product. A kids’ club could be an effective way of making children get involved abd. Kids clubs, organized by retailers, producers and media outlets, have proliferated in recent times. They offer an opportunity to develop a more personal relationship with each child, get information about the children for marketing purposes that can be used for mailing lists and data bases, and to promote products to children of particular age groups and geographical locations. Organize children parties and bring them their heroes, let them play with them and give them some gifts, of course related to the heroes themselves.
Without advertising there would be a lot less toys and a lot less children’s programming. TV channels such as Nickelodeon or the Cartoon Network are based on children advertising. There are several advertisements during the whole day, many of them producing a product with a ‘super-hero’ related to them. By spending some money on advertising the product in those channels, the brand can achieve even more recognition.
Many successful brands such as Coca Cola, Kellogg’s and Disney owe their success to the strategy that is suggested. Approach children with what they like more. Make them remember the product whenever they see their favorite hero on a cartoon on a Saturday morning.
It is important to target children at their earliest age possible. At six months of age, the same age they are imitating simple sounds like "ma-ma," babies are forming mental images of corporate logos and mascots. According to recent marketing industry studies, a person's "brand loyalty" may begin as early as age two.
By establishing the brand with a name a logo that will be friendly and interesting to children, the brand can become more recognized and widely preferred by the young customers. A future designed logo that will remind of super heroes and adventures is a good idea for targeting all ages of childhood. Older children will become familiar with it and younger children will save it in their developing memory.
An important factor is the times that the advertising takes place. By any means it is vital to invest on advertising on Saturdays, Sundays and holiday periods. Children programs and even children networks are the target. It is almost certain that a child will see the product on these days, as TV is their main hobby inside the house.
But TV is not the only field of advertising. The radio, less proffered by children is an important mean of establishing the brand inside the market. Children you are taken to school by car or even when they are out with their parents for shopping, listen to the radio inside the car and can create pictures in their mind, which is sometimes more effective than watching pictures. Try and advertise the brand in early morning hours, when children go to school with their parents.
The market place itself is an important mean of advertising. Inside the stores, together with the extra promotions, the brand could be advertised through posters, labels and signs, placed near the children’s products and promoting the special hero using the product.
The basic aim of advertising is not just to make the brand well-known. Its purpose has to do with the memory of the children and the excitement they feel when watching their ‘idol’ on the TV. With careful steps, loyalty can be an easy issue and advertising combined with all the other promotion that is described in the report, can be really profitable for the brand.
One growing, enormous area that has not yet been mentioned is the Internet. Numerous web sites feature advertising to children. In fact, many web sites are set up exclusively for children. A growing number of web sites are now eliciting personal information. Some even use incentives and gifts to get e-mail addresses or other personal info. A well-designed Webster would be excellent fo the brand’s interaction with the children. This way the traditional brand-customer relationship is expanded. The child can be updated for the latest news regarding the product launch, interact with other children or even download their favorite hero’s pictures. All these could be included in a web site that should be the friendliest possible to children but also their parents, with the providence of important information for the product and the brand. Also, advertising on the Internet can expand more, using other sites. Sites such as these of children programs or cartoons can be an excellent field of advertisement.
Children deserve special attention because they are most likely to accept and orient their view of life to the one TV and TV advertising promote, especially as television was becoming a major source of information and ideas. Of course they do deserve special attention but a good number of them are often smart enough to see through the tall and misleading claims of advertisers. Several brands specifically targeted at children have fallen by the wayside.
Always remember the ability of children to differentiate between programming and advertising. By age seven, children are able to understand the purposes and techniques of advertising and by the teen years, children are sometimes more critical towards deception than adults. So all the steps should be taken carefully and should apply to the regulations. Children are a sensitive group of people and the technique the brand could use to approach them should be studied carefully and cover all the above issues. So all the steps should be taken carefully and apply to the regulations.
Try and establish the brand by exploiting the power of pictures and sounds as much as possible. Children get excited by these and like action and motion. The marketing strategy in respect of advertising described above is the way, and as mentioned again, there are huge examples of success inside the market industry. By getting to know the child’s psychology and how advertising stimulates their brain the brand gets to know how to promote the product more effectively.
CONCLUSION
Advertising to children definitely has both positive and negative benefits that help and hinder the development of the child. Regardless of the effects that marketers have on our youth, advertisements will continue. New areas of the ethical debate will also continue to grow. Some of these new issues are the controversies that are arising from the exponential growth of the Internet and of global marketing. Both governmental agencies and parents need to be aware of this continuing debate as these new issues arise. Likewise, awareness needs to be developed on how these new issues affect children based on existing psychological research so that parents and the government can react in the best manner possible.
