The process through which children acquire the necessary skills to function as consumers is termed as `consumer socialization'. Research on consumer socialization has spanned over three decades, with several studies conducted to cover diverse topics such as children's understanding of advertising, products, brands, shopping knowledge, decision-making skills, negotiation strategies, and parent_child relationships with respect to the consumer environment. This paper studies the moderating role of a child's familiarity with the product category in the formation of brand attitudes as a result of information that the child processes from television advertising. Children's inherent liking and familiarity with a product category determines the extent of processing of information to form a brand attitude. The study reveals that brand awareness, which is the primary level cognition of a brand in long-term memory, differs for familiar versus unfamiliar product categories, and hence the subsequent stages of brand attitude formation are also likely to be different for familiar versus unfamiliar product categories.
Children today are living in a "brandscape"—brands being an integral part of their familiar environment. They speak of "brands" more than "products" (Pecheux and Derbaix, 1999). For children, brands are one of the most salient aspects of the market place. Brands are advertised on television, displayed in stores, used at home, and talked about in school with friends (John, 1999).
Even before they are able to read, children as young as two years of age can recognize familiar brands (Haynes et al., 1993 and Derscheid et al., 1996). The pre-school (i.e., 3-4 years) children begin to recall and recognize brand names associated with visual cues such as colors, pictures or cartoon characters (Macklin, 1996). By middle childhood (i.e., 7-8 years), children can name multiple brands in many product categories such as cereals, snacks and toys (Rubin, 1974; Rossiter, 1976; Ward et al., 1977 and McNeal, 1992). In the period from birth to adolescence, children acquire sophisticated consumer abilities in storing knowledge about products and brands, thereby showing a greater preference for one brand over another (John, 1999). |
