What: How corporations will try any tactic to snare our kids.

The Lowdown: The term ‘pester power’ has fairly negative connotations. It brings to mind bratty, spoilt, and unmanageable children, pulling on the sleeves of their parents as they walk past the toy aisle. However, pester-power is a fairly new phenomena. With development of brands, coinciding with individuals having more and more expendable cash (even at the expense of debt), children are now seen as buyers, even though they aren’t. The methods used to advertise to children is often unethical: telling our children what toys are cool, which products will make them stand out, make them popular. Marketing methods go so far as to tell children which toys are for which gender (think of Tonka Trucks for boys campaign, or Bratz for girls).

What We Say: So what do we want for our children? Corporate Babysitter has an excellent post up about five things she wants to see from marketers, the first being ‘don’t take advantage’, which is on the top of my list. What are you concerns about marketing towards children?

Photo courtesy of flickr.