11
Commercial Epistemologies of Childhood:
“Fun” and the Leveraging of Children’s
Subjectivities and Desires
Daniel Thomas Cook
James McNeal, pioneer of children’s consumer research, noted once that he
received hate mail after the publishing of “The Child Consumer—A New
Market” in 1969 in the Journal of Retailing (McNeal, 1987: xv). His detractors—some of whom were marketers—according to McNeal did not concern
themselves with the content of the argument where he discusses the size of
the market of children aged 5–13, the satisfactions children gained from
purchasing, the kinds of consumer knowledge that arise at different ages,
and the ways companies were already marketing to children. The complaint,
rather, centered on the fact that he identified and named children as a market,
thereby rendering childhood a legitimate site for commercial exploration. It
was the act of defining and thus conceptualizing children as consumers, that
triggered the intense response.
Four decades hence, concerns about children’s consumer involvement both
have expanded and fragmented in publicly voiced complaints about “spoiled
brats,” unscrupulous marketers, and/or inattentive parents in the United
States and elsewhere. A significant, vocal segment remains vigilant against
any kind of marketing directed at children (Linn, 2004; Schor, 2004). Public
discourse on the whole, however, tends to accept the existence of children
consumers as a social inevitability, with the focus on sorting “good” from
“bad” consumption and marketing.
The change from hate mail for identifying children as a market to the
contemporary situation where there exist entire television networks, brands,
and stores developed to cultivate and serve this market entails a transformation that extends beyond a simple growth in “demand.” The historical rise
Inside Marketing
and contemporary significance of the children’s market involves, in a fundamental way, new conceptualizations of “the child” as a social actor and being
(Cook, 2004; Cross, 2004; Jacobson, 2004). The new view of the child was not
brought about entirely by marketing alone; I contend, however, that it would
not have taken hold absent the actions of marketers.
In the course of plying their trade, market practitioners—that is, marketers,
researchers, designers, manufacturers, and other market actors—actively configure notions of markets, consumers, and consumption. When conceptualizing and executing research, contemplating the audience to whom to direct a
promotion, conjecturing about the impact of a design, or developing a brand
strategy, market actors utilize and rely upon culturally based and historically
specific ideas about who consumers are, their motivations, and the manner in
which they engage with what one might call the marketplace. Ideas about the
make-up of consumers and their actions underlie and inform virtually the
whole of marketing practice as many scholars have demonstrated (Davila,
2001; Mazzarella, 2003; Sender, 2004). One can no more develop a product
or test a brand concept without imagining a “consumer,” as one could purchase
advertising space without data on the breakdown of potential audiences.
The perspective put forth here understands ideas—in this case, the idea of
the child consumer—as occupying a reality on a par with “concrete” things.
Ideas have this status because they have consequences. McNeal’s act of naming children as a market serves as a case in point about the power of definition.
It also brings to the fore issues regarding the moral dimensions of markets
and market behavior in terms of who and what can be deemed appropriate
subjects for commercial action.
In the following discussion, I delve into some of the contours of what I call
“commercial epistemologies” of children’s consumption. An epistemology,
put simply, refers to a theory of knowledge and of the sources and structures of
knowledge in a particular domain. I intend the term to highlight the socially
constructed nature of commercially relevant knowledge about children’s
consumer identities, particularly as it pertains to marketing practices and
discourses of market actors. Commercial epistemologies are ways of “knowing” about children and childhood that arise from the interested positions of
those whose livelihoods revolve around ascertaining the marketability of
goods and ideas. One might think of commercial epistemologies as lenses
through which market actors see and apprehend children and childhood for
specific purposes and toward particular ends.
Drawing mainly upon published trade materials, I discuss how knowledge
derived in and from marketing practice, including consumer research, configure notions of the “child” in ways that make marketing to children not only
morally palatable but, in some cases, akin to a civic duty. The significant point
to be gleaned from this mainly theoretical–conceptual treatment revolves
258
“Fun” and the Leveraging of Children’s Subjectivities and Desires
around they ways in which this “child”—more specifically, the child’s perspective—takes on the character of a currency or value to be leveraged so as to
secure market share. After laying out some of the ways the “child” is leveraged,
I delve into examples and discussion of how fun and playful food serve as
particularly useful entrée points into the commercial forms of knowledge
about childhood.
To Know is to Sell: Leveraging the Child’s Perspective
Marketers know, or come to learn quickly, that promoting and marketing
products intended for children’s use and consumption takes place within a
highly surveilled, emotionally charged moral context. At its heart, the moral
question surrounding children’s participation in consumer life concerns itself
with determining the extent to which the target market (usually specified by
age and gender) can be said to be able to behave as knowing consumers. Such
determinations encode judgments regarding the appropriateness of the product or promotion in terms of age or developmental stage. If the child consumer is imagined as willful, even savvy, then suspicion of exploitation on the
part of the marketer can be obviated to some extent because the child can be
said to have the ability to make decisions on some fundamental level that can
be recognized as legitimate. Put simply, the more children appear or are
construed as more or less competent social actors, the more directly they can
be addressed and acted upon as a primary, non-derivative market without
intense moral approbation.
Conceptualizing children as knowing consumers extends beyond providing
moral cover for marketers. It makes practical sense to be able to consider
children as having desires and preferences of their own who in some way are
able to act upon them, even as these are mediated by parental gatekeepers,
lawmakers, and consumer watchdog groups. Prior to the 1980s, most of the
usable knowledge about children’s consumer and media behavior was derived
less from direct research on children and more from the application of general
developmental psychology to specific age–gender categories and matched
with income and spending data (Cook, 2000). In the ensuing decades, direct
market research on and with children has arisen as an industry in its own
right, with a significant number of firms specializing in children, replete with
innovative and proprietary methods and measures. Having the (moral) rightof-way to focus on children as consumers in their own right—to research and
“know” them directly—allows market researchers to discern the particular
contours and details of children’s perspectives and attitudes toward products
and campaigns and thus tailor these accordingly. The more marketers, retailers, designers, and manufacturers can know, or claim to know, what children
259
Inside Marketing
themselves want, the stronger their moral and strategic position to serve the
child market.
Hence, it is not surprising that the exponential growth in the children’s
market since 1990 has been accompanied both by increased efforts to research
and “know” the child and by the advent of sustained rhetoric about the
“savvy-ness” of the contemporary child consumer (Banet-Wiser, 2007; Cook,
2007; see Schor 2004: 180–1). An important component of children’s market
research centers on garnering the child’s view of goods, promotions, and
experiences. Market research firms leverage “the child” and, more particularly,
the child’s perspective as a form of symbolic currency that can be exchanged
for monetary currency. The more a firm can demonstrate that it knows how to
elicit and translate children’s expression into actionable insights better than
other firms and certainly the client, the better its market position in the child
knowledge trade.
Just Kid, Inc., for instance, founded in 1994, necessarily positions themselves
as experts in understanding what kids “really think”: “We know how to design
questionnaires and surveys that reveal what kids are really thinking, not what
they think you want to hear. And our only view of the world is seen ‘through a
kid’s lens.’” 1 The Geppetto Group promotes their expertise in understanding
the “underlying motivations of childhood”—which they call “Kid Why”—and
in “decoding the discreet and powerful dimensions of kid humor,” among
other things.2 KidzEyes, an online survey panel, makes children’s responses
to questions available to participating companies and boasts that its only goal is
to “gather kids” opinions and views so that companies can see their products,
services, and trends through kids’ eyes.3 In this powerful and well-positioned
belief system, to “know” the child (through research) is to, in a sense, respect
the child by seeking her or his views, tendencies, and preferences in the effort to
tailor goods and purchasing opportunities in light of this knowledge. Paco
Underhill (2001), retail anthropologist and President and CEO of Envirosell,
Inc., discusses how observations made of children in retail stores can inform
the placement of goods on shelves. “If it’s within their (children’s) reach, they
will touch it, and if they touch it there’s at least a chance that Mom or Dad will
relent and buy it.” Here retailers, armed with research on the “child’s perspective,” encourage children to assert their preferences by either requesting an
item (often repeatedly) or by putting the item in the cart without permission
until discovered later, perhaps at the checkout counter, which is then either
purchased or discarded by the parent. McNeal (1999: iv) notes that conducting
research on children can offer insights into their views on goods, packaging,
the layout of stores, and on whether they feel welcomed or not in such environments. He points to a drawing by a child depicting herself reaching in vain
for the M&M’s candy on a top shelf as evidence of children’s understanding of
their potential disempowerment in retail settings (p. iv).
260
“Fun” and the Leveraging of Children’s Subjectivities and Desires
The “respect” marketers demonstrate for children by seeking out their
voices and views through research, according to Sutherland and Thompson
(2001), is simply following the model set by contemporary, “liberal” parents
who have “bi-directional” relationships with their children where influence
flows both ways (p. 17). “Families who do not confer with their children
about purchases . . . deny their kids an opportunity to develop important life
skills” (p. 18). Market discourse—which is a form of practice—here extends
beyond a strictly commercial relationship to encompass beliefs about how
children’s participation in consumer decisions relates to children’s “development.” Market research, in this way, does not simply uncover actionable
“truths” about consumer behavior; it both draws upon and contributes to
larger understandings of childhood, parenthood, and their relation to the
world of commerce.
Two recent and persistent marketing truths have to do with the oft-repeated
notion of the “savvy” child consumer, almost regardless of age, and how
marketing contributes to children’s empowerment. A number of scholars,
including myself, have written on the emergence and importance of these
ideas since the 1990s (Buckingham, 2000; Schor, 2004; Cook, 2004, 2007).
One argument, again offered by Sutherland and Thompson (2001), centers on
the extensive choices children now have in the marketplace which lead to
“media conscious kids”: “Instead of transmitting the idea that self-worth is
something kids buy at the mall, our marketing-driven culture and multimedia
world mean that kids learn early on how to interpret and react to a society that
is falling over itself to cater to them” (p. 71). Marketing makes contemporary
kids more intelligent, a view recently echoed by others (Johnson, 2005). The
variety of goods and media now available to savvy children and their liberal
parents do more than offer choices and “developmental” opportunities; for
some, these market-based choices are positively empowering to the extent
that they allow children to exercise options and hence to realize, in some
measure, dimensions of their own selves (Schor, 2004: 181–3; Cook, 2007).
Indeed, from these statements, it would seem downright negligent to refrain
from marketing to children.
Marketer discourses enact commercial epistemologies of children’s consumption to the extent that they define, analyze, and conceptualize children
and their relationship to adults/parents in reference to the world of goods.
Market research serves as the practical vehicle through which the model of the
knowing, desiring child consumer becomes enlivened, given dimension and,
as well, infused political and social purpose. “Knowing the child” in a particular, proprietary way, as claimed by the research firms mentioned above, provides a competitive edge; as well, it brings the child in as a partner against
counterclaims about inappropriateness in terms of level of development
(Linn, 2004) or concerns about materialism (Schor, 2004).
261
Inside Marketing
“Fun”: A Portal into Children’s Perspectives
Market research often seeks the child’s perspective as a way both to tailor
messages and goods to specific audiences and as a way to address children as
legitimate consumers in their own right. In recent years, marketers increasingly have come to recognize, research, and utilize “fun” as a particularly childrelevant lens through which one can know and speak to children’s interests.
One market researcher, for instance (Poris, 2005: 14), considers fun and play
as “absolutely vital” to brand awareness and success and as an “essential cost
of entry to the kids” market. Her study conducted for Just Kid, Inc. found ten
different kinds of fun4 unevenly distributed over a variety of age, gender, and
racial–ethnic characteristics. In an article written to publicize the study, the
author concludes that “(u)nderstanding the ten distinct dimensions of fun
will allow marketers and advertisers to connect with kids on the type of
fun that matters most to them and will increase their likelihood of successfully
developing products and messages that resonate with kids” (p. 22). “Fun” here
stands as a form of instrumental knowledge, a way of making entrée into
children’s worlds so as to develop products that “connect” marketers with
kids. The study (The FUNdamentals Study) positions itself as the “first syndicated quantitative research tool to provide a “deep dive” on kids’ definitions of
fun” (from a Just Kid, Inc. promotional brochure, no date or title). It offers
marketing professionals a “richer, more granular” understanding of kid fun so
they may better position advertising, have more successful new products and
programs, and produce more effective promotions.
Play and fun, for marketers, have long served as portals into children’s subjectivities and hence as avenues to discern and act upon their desires. It is in the
realm of food and eating where fun and play have taken hold most decisively as
marketing strategy, particularly since the 1990s. The historical examples of the
fun-food-child connection are varied and long, and cannot be discussed here
with the kind of attention required, but well-known examples abound—for
example, candies (James, 1982), the prizes in Cracker Jack boxes, McDonald’s
Happy Meals, tie-ins with radio, television, film and sports, character licensing,
among others. I focus the remainder of the discussion on some ways market
practitioners have sought to promote edibles and related packaging as forms
of entertainment, or what has become known popularly as “eatertainment.”
“Eatertainment”: Shapes, Colors, Packaging, and Containers
Eatertainment makes fun and amusement the point of food and meals and is
often associated with themed restaurants (Gottdiener, 2001) intended for
children and adults alike, but now found in many forms associated with the
262
“Fun” and the Leveraging of Children’s Subjectivities and Desires
supermarket and supermarket foods. In the world of children’s grocery
foods, the shapes, colors, containers, and textures of foodstuffs intended for
children have made many items identifiable as belonging to “kids,” intended
to “involve” the child with the food beyond the activity of eating. Often
the “interaction” of the child with the food item resembles grade school
arts-and-crafts activities such as painting or manipulating shapes, further
solidifying the connection of the food with “fun.”
Identifiable, even trademarked, shapes of foods transport the item out of the
everyday, generic world of mundane eating. Animal Crackers is perhaps the
longest standing and best-known brand that use shapes in this way. Pepperidge Farm products have aggressively branded and promoted Goldfish
snacks—small, cheese-flavored crackers in the shape of fish—through advertisements, its website,5 and by publishing children’s storybooks using the fish
as the main characters (McGrath, 1999a; Kirkpatrick, 2000).6 A number of
other companies, such as Kellogg’s Fruit Loops, Cheerios cereal (McGrath,
1999b), Oreo cookies, and SunMaid Raisins (Weir, 1999), have also published
children’s storybooks where the personified food brand serves as the protagonist. Food shapes need not be iconic to be fun, only an intervention into the
ordinary. Miniaturization is one tactic. VDK Frozen goods introduced minipancakes and French toast sticks under the Aunt Jemima brand that can be
eaten as finger foods and dunked into syrup for kids “on the go” (Supermarket
Business, 1999). Whimsical shapes also indicate fun. Children’s cold cereals
for decades have had characters, shapes, and colorful food bits associated with
them. Dole, the canned fruit company, extended this practice with its line of
fruits shaped like moons, stars, sea creatures, and seashells to sell the “mother
snack food market” with appeals to nutrition (McGrath, 1999b). In 2001,
Fran’s Healthy Helpings, an upstart company, introduced Socceroni and
Cheese with soccer ball shaped pasta—perhaps taking the “soccer mom”
demographic a bit too literally—and Dino Chicken Chompers made of
chicken pieces in the shape of dinosaurs (Cioletti, 2001).
Food shapes execute several commercial functions. For one, they can help
make the product and/or brand recognizable outside of the container. GrapeNuts, traditionally an “adult” health cereal, began marketing Grape-Nuts O’s
(with added sugar) in a “fun and contemporary new shape that a younger
consumer can relate to” (Toops, 1999), according to a company spokesperson.
Fruit Loops and Lucky Charms are among the cereals that, according to two
British brand consultants, put a “3D equity in the brand” thus enhancing its
“pester power.” To get children to say “I want one that looks like . . .” can
sometimes be enough if the name is forgotten, they maintain (Brand Strategy,
2002). For another, they “speak” to children’s subjectivities, their perspectives, by “playing” with the ordinary, making it fun and thus properly in the
realm of things that belong to “kids.”
263
Inside Marketing
The marketing of fun serves as a portal into children’s subjectivities also
through the colors, containers, and packaging of food. Heinz foods famously
introduced E-Z Squirt in 2000, an easy-to-grip squeezable bottle which was
filled with green-colored ketchup. According to Dave Siegel of Wondergroup,
Inc. (November 4, 2005 interview with the author), a market research firm, the
idea of an off-colored condiment that could be treated as paint arose from
observing children playing in a research setting with arts and crafts. The
success, he believes, lay not so much in the novelty of the color of the ketchup
but with the ability to play with their food. The bottle design allowed children
to draw with the food on their buns or plates. The color and design of the
product “talk” to children “so that they form a lifelong relationship with
Heinz,” according to the managing director of Heinz USA’s ketchup, condiments, and sauces division (Thompson, 2000).
Package design is integral to creating and maintaining the fun-sales-food
nexus. A product and packaging executive offers four important principles of
“kid packaging” to marketers (Sensbach, 2000). First, kids are “savvy” consumers who thereby require that the package message and market segment be
clear because “fun” means different things to children of different ages.
Second, a good package must use their language which is visually oriented.
Third, it capitalizes on the power of media by allying with popular licensed
characters. Finally, for kids, “the package is the product.” It is what they see
first on the shelves. Breakfast cereal boxes, which can be “veritable amusement parks,” are prime sites for children’s attention and involvement.
“Because kids will read a cereal box five or six times before the product is
used up, it’s a perfect venue for cross promotions, premiums, games, puzzles,
collectibles such a as trading cards and educational opportunities” (Sensbach,
2000: 14). Note how the marketing discourse operates within “the child’s”
perspective by lauding their agency and knowledge (i.e., “savvy” consumers),
all the while unproblematically invoking children’s desires as having a natural
or essential affinity with the unspecified product to be carefully packaged
accordingly.
“Kid sizing” of meals and containers further moves the idea of food and
meals in the direction of making them child specific. The “grab and go” appeal
to busy parents and over-scheduled children has made headway into such
areas as Yoplait brand Go-Gurts, a child-sized squeezable tube of yogurt,
replete with personified, exciting graphics of a youthful, slightly crazed boy
on the container, and, of course, its own website.7 Mini-sized juices, puddings,
bags of potato chips, containers of apple sauce, and bite-sized frozen foods
help to delineate a specifically designated child world of foodstuffs. These
miniatures carry out a kind of “double talk” of appealing both to children
(via images of fun, amusement, and a sense of cultural ownership of the
product) and to mothers with the convenience of prefigured serving sizes
264
“Fun” and the Leveraging of Children’s Subjectivities and Desires
and disposable containers small enough to fit into school lunch bags. Fun
works in and for kids’ marketing in large part because shared, contemporary
beliefs position children as inhabiting something of a parallel world to
adults—one where play and fantasy form (or hopefully form) a protective
barrier from the vile, everyday world of drudgery and unchecked self-interest.
The Disney Corporation has built and empire on just this notion. This
“magic” now extends to adults who may seek to re-live a time of “protective
innocence” by delving into “wondrous innocence,” to use Gary Cross’ (2004)
terms.
Martha Wolfenstein (1955) pointed out over five decades ago that parents
in American culture, especially mothers, tend to feel it a duty to have fun
with—and perhaps “be” fun to—their children. Since that time, market efforts
have helped transform the fun imperative of parenting and of childhood into
something akin to a child’s right—most certainly into a marker of recognition
of children’s desires and perspectives. When marketers and designers deploy
whimsical images, bright colors, and out-of-the ordinary names and shapes to
the packaging of food products, they are indicating to children and adults
alike that certain foods are meant “for kids.”
Such a gesture distinguishes child from adult and provides for a sense of
propriety, of cultural ownership, on the part of children. When a product
“speaks” to children in visual, verbal, and design languages—when something
cajoles fun and play—it gives an indication that someone or something
recognizes them and that they have a place in and among the world of
goods. This strategy, which has been utilized perhaps most globally by the
Nickelodeon television network (Banet-Wiser, 2007), calls out and favors the
kind of enterprising self-privileged in neoliberal capitalism theorized by Foucault (1982, 1991) and Rose (1990). “Fun,” in this way, enacts contemporary
(adult/parental) wishes for a benign childhood, addresses children as social
and market actors, and, at the same time, provides a bridge to the world of
commerce without which the fun—and the self that accompanies it—could
not arise and be made manifest on their own.
Final Thoughts
Marketing ideology in itself is not mysterious. The point is to secure workable
knowledge for clients so that both realize financial benefit. When children
are at issue, however, the interested and instrumental nature of gathering
and using this knowledge becomes problematic. Hence, great effort is expended to garner the perspective of the child, to seek out her or his expressions
of preference, and thereby to reconfigure the consumer research act as
265
Inside Marketing
something of an altruistic one that entails listening to children and responding to their needs and wants.
In the act of executing research and subsequent product development and
advertising campaigns, market practitioners at once draw upon, help create,
and ultimately disseminate images and conceptions of children as knowing,
desiring consumers. In the process, this marketing labor thereby re-legitimates
children as consumers—that is, as an identity necessarily tied to the commercial world. Marketing ideology in this way feeds back on itself as when
commercial constructions forged in the act of attempting to capture market
share reappear as naturalized and given characteristics of consumers. The
child consumer persists, in part because commercial epistemologies—ways
of knowing—assist in creating morally appropriate social identities which
children can inhabit and parents can find provisionally acceptable. The knowing, desiring child does not simply live in the marketer’s dream, but also in the
parent’s kitchen.
If we are, or seem to be, distant from the mindset that produced hate mail
for McNeal’s understandings about children and consumer markets, it is due
in significant part to the diffusion of general and specific beliefs about consumption and marketing and the place of goods in everyday life. Childhood
itself transforms and has been transformed by marketing practice—a practice
that can never confine itself to its target—and hence will continue to mutate
into forms in the future perhaps unrecognizable from those we accept today as
given and natural.
Notes
1. Just Kid Inc. Website, http://www.justkidinc.com/kid_research.html (accessed
December 10, 2009).
2. Geppetto Website, http://www.geppettogroup.com/ (accessed December 10, 2009).
3. Kidzeyes Website, http://www.kidzeyes.com/faq.htm#1 (accessed December 10,
2009).
4. These are: friend-orientated fun, empowering fun, creative fun, silly fun, sportsorientated fun, competitive fun, family-orientated fun, surprising/adventurous fun,
relaxing fun, and rebellious fun.
5. Pepperidge Farm Website, http://www.pfgoldfish.com/ (accessed December 10,
2009).
6. Also available at Advertising Educational Foundation Website, http://www.aef.com/
(accessed February 24, 2004).
7. Yoplait Website http://www.yoplait.com/products_gogurt.aspx (accessed December
10, 2009).
266
“Fun” and the Leveraging of Children’s Subjectivities and Desires
References
Banet-Wiser, S. (2007) Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Brand Strategy (2002a) “Entertainment Puts Brands on the Plate.” January 9: 26.
——(2002b) “A Fruity Brand Extension.” July 26: 24.
Buckingham, David (2000) After the Death of Childhood. Cambridge: Polity.
Cioletti, Jeff (2001) “Kid-venience.” Supermarket Business, May 15, 2001 (on-line,
accessed January 10, 2003).
Cook, Daniel Thomas (2000) “The Other ‘Child Study’: Figuring Children as Consumers in Market Research, 1910s–1990s.” Sociological Quarterly, 41(3, Summer):
487–507.
——(2004) The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the
Rise of the Child Consumer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
——(2007) “The Disempowering Empowerment of Children’s Consumer ‘Choice.’”
Society and Business Review 2(1): 37–52.
Cross, Gary (2004) The Cute and the Cool. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Davila, Arlene (2001) Latinos, Inc. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Day, Sherri (2003) “The Potatoes Smile: The Fries are Blue.” New York Times, March 13,
2003., hhtp://www.nyt.com, accessed March 13, 2003.
Foucault, Michael (1982) “Afterword: The Subject and Power.” In H.F. Dreyfus and
P. Rainbow, eds. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Brighton:
Harvester Press.
——(1991) “Governmentality.” In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, eds. The
Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with
Michel Foucault. London: Harverster Wheatsheaf.
Gottdiener, Mark (2002a). The Theming of America. Boulder: Westview Press, 2001.
Hunter, Beatrice Trum (2002a) “Marketing Foods to Kids: Using Fun to Sell.” Consumer
Research, 85(3, March): 16–20.
——(2002b) “Marketing Foods to Kids: Using New Avenues.” Consumers Research, 85(4,
April): 23–36.
Jacobson, Lisa (2004) Raising Consumers. New York: Columbia University Press.
James, Allison (1982) “Confections, Concoctions and Conceptions.” Oxford Anthropological Journal, 10(2): 83–95.
Johnson, Steven (2005) Everything Bad is Good for You. New York: Riverhead.
Kirkpatrick, David D. (2000) “Snack Foods Become Stars of Books for Children.”
New York Times, September 22, 2000 (on-line) also available at http://www.aef.
com/,accessed February 24, 2004.
Levine, Jane (2000) “Junk-Food Marketing Goes Elementary.” Educational Digest, 65(5,
January): 32–4.
Linn, Susan (2004) Consuming Kids. New York: Random House.
McGrath, Barbara Barbieri (1999a) Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Funbook. New York:
HarperCollins.
McGrath, Barbara Barbieri (1999b) The Cheerios Counting Book. New York: Scholastic
Books.
267
Inside Marketing
McNeal, James U. (1987) Children as Consumers: Insights and Implications. Lexington,
MA: Lexington Books.
——(1992) Kids as Customers. New York: Lexington Books.
——(1999) The Kids’ Market: Myths and Realities. Ithaca, NY: Paramount Market
Publishing.
Mazzarella, William (2003) Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham: Duke University Press.
Poris, Michelle (2005) “What Fun Means to Today’s Kids.” Young Consumers 6(4):
14–22.
Rose, Nicholas (1990) Governing the Soul. London: Routledge.
Schor, Juliet (2004) Born to Buy. New York: Scribners.
Sender, Katherine (2004) Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Sensbach, Paul R. (2000) “Don’t Kid around with Kid Packaging.” Marketing News, 34
(24) (November): 14.
Supermarket Business (1999) “What’s New Around the Store.” April 1, 1999, accessed
through http://progessivegrocer.com/, July 2003.
Sutherland, Anne, and Thompson, Beth (2001) Kidfluence: Why Kids Today Mean
Business. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Meyerson.
Thompson, Stephanie (1999) “Gen’l Mills Taps into Craze with Pokemon Rolls Treat.”
Advertising Age, October 4, 1999.
Turscik, Richard (2002) “Category Captains 2002.” Progressive Grocer, November 15,
http://www.progressivegrocer.com/, accessed February 5, 2003.
Underhill, Paco (2000) Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Weir, Alison (1999) The SunMaid Raisins Play Book. Little Simon: New York.
Wolfenstein, Martha (1955) “Fun Morality.” In Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein,
eds. Childhood in Contemporary Cultures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
pp. 168–78.
268