Jesus Creed
What product did you buy as a child but that you still purchase though you know it is not the wisest of choices?
One paradox of advertising comes from a powerful inverse relationship between age and money. The people most likely to be swayed by most commercials are impressionable children (who have no money). Meanwhile, it’s incredibly difficult to persuade adults (who have all the money) to break from habit and buy a new product.
A new study from the Journal of Consumer Research finds a clever loophole in this paradox. People hold onto a deep fondness for brands, like Kellogg’s cereal and other foods with friendly mascots, that they were exposed to as children. The consumer brain is a bag of concrete mix before a person turns 13: Anything you can slip in the soft blend is likely to harden, along with our neural networks, by the time we become a money-spending adult. This Concrete-Mix theory of habit formation was behind efforts to ban cigarette ads targeting young people….
“This research is the first to hypothesize and test a model that explains how childhood exposure to advertising can have effects on product evaluation that persist into adulthood,” the authors wrote. They found that, although people tend to be highly critical of promises made in advertisements, they’re more likely to positively evaluate a product they learned to love as a child. It’s as if their mushy, impressionable child brain returns to block their ability to think like a full-grown adult….
But the study still provides more ammunition for the idea that advertising to children is qualitatively different from advertising to adults. If you want to break a country’s bad habits—from smoking tobacco to eating crap—best to start young.
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