INFLUENCE OF MEDIA ON KIDS BUYING BEHAVIOUR IN INDORE CITY. Rachna Kaul ABSTRACT

Transcription

1 INFLUENCE OF MEDIA ON KIDS BUYING BEHAVIOUR IN INDORE CITY Lecturer Neetu Jain, Sanghvi Institute of Management and Science, Pigdamber, Pithampur Bypass, Next to IIM, Rau, Indore Rachna Kaul Sanghvi Institute of Management and Science, Pigdamber, Pithampur Bypass, Next to IIM, Rau, Indore ABSTRACT This study shows the influence of media on children which affects their buying behavior. Today both parents are working so kids have enough time to get exposed to media it may be either through internet, t.v. etc. Parents have their own guilt factor of not being able to give quality time to their kids which has resulted in increase in spending on kids and satisfaction of kid s desires. This research was carried out by designing a questionnaire which was filled by parents, has showed strong impact of media on kids buying behavior so all brands have moved into this direction to reap benefits. Keywords: Buying Behaviour, Parents Guilt, Media Influence Introduction: The world belongs to kids. Kid is the cynosure in the family. Family structures have undergone huge change and it is witnessed that there is an increase in the number of single parent and dual career families. Parents are today that much capable monetarily, to fulfill every wish of their child irrespective of ethical, psychological or economic impact over kids. So Kids have direct or indirect influence over family buying decisions. Influence of children varies by product, product sub-decision, stage of the decision making process, nature of socialization of children, families gender role orientation, demographic features such as age and gender, and also by respondent selected for investigation of relative influence (Belch et al., 1985). The major driving force behind this influence is Media, i.e. providing various modes of information. Kids are getting greater exposure by these various modes. Among these various modes Television is an important medium of information because of its massive presence in children s lives. Winick and Winick (1979) refer to television as a member of the family, suggesting that TV constitutes a very significant component of a child s development.the advent of niche channels like cartoon network, hungama and pogo etc. have given marketers to capture the kids attention and promote their product which are specially designed for them. They associate celebrity and cartoon character with the products so it is quite easy for their little customers to retain information related to products and recall them. The practice is largely witnessed in restaurants giving small toys as a token of remembrance to children such as McDonalds (Williams and Veeck, 1998), or associating a cartoon character with a cereal.marketers are unanimous that digital (internet and mobile) is the medium to reach out to this segment, particularly in urban cities. A recent study by Cartoon Network, New Generations 2011, reveals that 79 per cent of children in the age group 7-14 are mobile phone users today, and that their spending power has gone up sharply pocket money has shot up by over 200 per cent in the past 10 years, and 59 per cent in the past five. Internet access for the age group has quadrupled in the past 10 years. Playing games, listening /downloading music, social sites and search are the top online activities for kids.

2 So Internet is proving to be a great channel for marketers to create a buzz through newsgroups, chat rooms and blogs about products ranging from clothes to music. Another source of information for kids is peer group that generates pressure on them. So peer pressure is influence that a peer group, observers or individual exerts that encourages others to change their attitudes or behaviour to conform to group norms. Peer pressure is most commonly associated with youth because most youth spend large amounts of time in schools and other fixed groups. So marketers use this technique to find peers that kids look up to and have them use or wear their product in order to create a hype around it. Goldstein (1998) writes that research has consistently shown that parents and classmates exert stronger influence on children than mass media do. Children are creative, great observer, innocent and unpredictable. They have different emotional, social and mental needs in their different stages of age. With the help of psychologists, advertisers now have in-depth insight to children's these needs and develop/sow consumer socialization in them. It is the process by which kids acquire skills knowledge and attitude that is required for converting them as consumers. There are three stages classifying by their ages. First, perceptual stage is related to three to seven year of age, wherein kids can differentiate ads from programme based on perceptual features, holding positive attitudes towards ads and believe that ads are truthful, funny and interesting. In Analytical stage, the second stage, related to 7-11 years of age,kids can distinguish ads from programme based on persuasive intent, holding negative attitudes and understand that ads may have contain a bias and deception. In last stage, the Reflective stage, included years of age, kids understand the persuasive intent of ads along with ads tactics and appeals. In nutshell Children are becoming consumers at younger and younger ages, and a variety of influences and experiences shapes their consumer habits. Literature Review Kids represent an important market segment to marketers because kids have their own buying behavior. Most of the time, kids monitor the buying decisions of their parents because they are the adults of future. Today most of the advertisers spend more on TV advertisements having children content to attract more children which are going to change the behavior of their parents. Now let us see what are variables involved in pester power effectiveness. That is what McNeal and Yeh, (1997) has also stated that due to increase in awareness of children market potential has increased in three ways that children are spending money they have, that is essentially their pocket money, to satisfy their own need. Impact of advertisements content and TV programs on children has gained significant importance by researchers and marketers. Berns (2004) has given a reason for the fact that children are now being used as a marketing tool is their cognitive immaturity, he constructed on this point by saying that children are more likely to believe that the images or characters they see on TV are real. According to Woodward, et al (1997) and O'Guinn and Shrum (1997) advertising and programming content are the two channels of communication which inform children and young people about products and encourage them to purchase. Another point that O' Guinn and Shrum (1997) has stated in his findings is that consumer behavior is learned by children more easily if they are targeted with persuasion shown in commercials and various TV programs. Expansion in media messages and continuous changes in media environment are two key contributors, explored by Kunkel, Wilcox and Cantor (2004), of increasing the level of advertisement subjected towards children. Peer Pressure is the second component of the research question, which influences children buying behaviors. Children spent a lot of their time in certain peer groups such as at school, play places or street friends belonging to different families. A child learns a lot from other children. The extent to which these gatherings influence varies from situation to situation. For example a child can even make a decision to buy his school bag by looking at other children. Same element of influence was studied by many researchers including Parsons et al., (1953), David and Roseboroug (1955), Moschis and Moore (1982) have described the impact of peer pressure in two ways, expressive consumption and effective consumption.

3 By expressive consumption they mean the social motivations and the materialistic values that are associated with the purchases while on the other hand purchase styles and modes of consumptions were categorized as effective consumption influence. This influence may or may not be productive as Bachmann, et al (1993) stated that consumption learning of consumption are from peers effect child consumer socialization directly or indirectly. Store Visits and Retailing environments also influence children buying behavior as Shim, et al (1995) proposed that children become more conscious about the information regarding products such as price and brands the more often parent take their children for the shopping. Keeping this in view marketer induce sales by adding some incentives for children to influence their parents to buy a product. For example, a fast food restaurant usually adds play place along with the dining hall or some retailer give away toys, snacks, sweets as gift with the products purchased. Although products are for adults but retailers make children pester their parents to buy that product. The attractive display of product also works in inducing this power more efficiently; these kinds of purchases made by parents under the influence of children are usually impulse purchases. According to research conducted by Schulman and Clancy (1992) on the most admired after school activities among the children depicts that watching TV got the highest attractive scores while second on the list was shopping which shows that in either of the two cases our research questions are being supported that these agents of socializations are impacting children behavior to a large extent. Cartoon character and Celebrities endorsement also has some bearing on children buying behavior. A recent study conducted by Dotson and Hyatt (2005) states that association of brands with certain popular sports, music and stars has increase the level of influence on children. Almost all children watch cartoon programs and other children oriented TV programs such as Quiz shows, Sports Shows etc. By introducing heroic characters like super-man, spider-man and various celebrities in advertisement make children buy that product because of emotional attachment of children with these things. Magazines aimed at children have blossomed. Many of these magazines are kid versions of adult magazines. For instance, the popular Sports Illustrated for Kids, carries ads for minivans. Magazines such as Time, Sports Illustrated and People have all launched kid and teen editions which boast ads for adult related products such as minivans, hotels and airlines. (Part IV Advertising & Society International Marketing Conference on Marketing & Society, 8-10 April, 2007, IIMK 320).Print media holds the potential to lure kids to try new products or promotes certain schemes associated to these products.advertisements and articles facilitate promoting the brands as well as pushing it to the consumers. Recently Times of India featured games and their reviews in a special magazines segments named What Hot.( Varsha Khattri 2011).Marketers have come up with a new medium wherein they can target the kids segment effectively. Internet turns out to be less expensive and it helps in focusing on a specific segment.conveying the message through blogs or social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook and Ibibo have become quite popular among the marketers as they can have a direct feedback, as well as target the right audience and gauge their responses. Various kids create their own communities and groups over the internet and hence share ideas, views and beliefs, which for any marketer is a gold mine. Apart from this various websites like, Yahoo or Google also help marketers in promoting their products by launching various online ad campaigns, online contests and online promotions. Yahoo kids are website which features games, communities, music, movies etc all suitable for kids. These all features are based on popular kids TV shows.(varsha Khattri 2011).The recent introductions of Advergames and Tribal Marketing need to be mentioned in this context. Advergames are web based computer games that incorporate advertising messages and images. They serve to reinforce brands in compelling ways because users have to register to be eligible for prizes. Tribal Marketing strategy helps in creating communities or social groups focused on a product or service. The strategy is based on the premise that the tech savvy child today has a fascination for technology that can add to his or her comfort along with providing the social advantage of being connected and linked. (Part IV Advertising & Society International Marketing Conference on Marketing & Society, 8-10 April, 2007, IIMK 320)

4 Objectives of the Study 1. To study the impact of media on kids buying behaviour. 2. To study how kids retain information which influence their buying behaviour. Hypothesis H 01 : Media does not influence kids buying behavior H 02 : Kids buying behavior does not get influenced by retained information Research Methodology Sampling Simple Random Sampling method has been used.the data has been collected from a sample of 200 parents of kids aged between 5-17years through self-structured questionnaire and interview. Kids were considered of both genders. The questionnaire included questions using Fivepoint Likert Scale. Data Analysis After collecting the responses from 200 of parents, an attempt was made to gather information about various modes of media i.e. Celebrity endorsement, movies, peer pressure, t.v etc. to capture the psychology of kids. These medium provides different ways to kids for retaining the information that influence their buying behaviour.one sample t-test was used to find out the most influential medium. This study helped us to assess the effect of media on kids and their recalling power. The following tables have the result on the basis of which further interpretation was done. Data Interpretation From table 1.2 it is significant that various modes of media have impact on kid s buying behaviour. Impact has got some reason behind it which leaves impression on the mind of kids. 1. In case of celebrity endorsement calculated p-value <0.05 so null hypothesis is rejected. It means celebrity affect the buying behavior of kids. Kids remember those products which are endorsed by celebrity while they are unable to recall the information about the products. In Indian scenario Celebrity s personality and market image are the influential factors for kids whether they are used in the packaging or endorsed the products. These celebrities fall into different categories like famous people, Cartoon characters and superhero. Cartoon characters and superhero are most preferable celebrity to influence their buying behavior. 2. For peer pressure calculated p-value <0.05, so null hypotheses is rejected. It implies kids get influenced by peers or friends. Kids interact with their peers about their consumption pattern, they are likely to be aware of peers choices and preferences and it influences their behavior. It leaves both positive and negative impression on their buying behaviour. Positivity or negativity depends on the peer s image and how much kids follow them. 3. In case of visit to malls calculated p-value < 0.05, the level of significance, so the null hypothesis is rejected. It was found that malls are best way to make product reachable for everyone. There are many activities to promote the products and aware the customers about the various products. Malls make feel kids that they have an identity as a customer

5 and give them exposure to put their own choice. There are specialized retail store and game zone for them. POP, fixtures etc. play an important role for impulse purchasing. 4. 4) It was found that in case of internet searching calculated p-value <0.05, which shows that internet targets kids very effectively. It is less expensive medium that provides various source of information for kids. Kids can share their views, beliefs and ideas through blogs, social networking sites like facebook, twitter etc. There are various online ad campaign, online contests and online promotions that influence kids choices and preferences and make them smart customers. 5. 5) In case of T.V. calculated p-value <0.05, so result implies that T.V. influences kids most T.V. programmes, ads draw the kids attention magnetically. TV ads use different audio and visual techniques that hold kids concern. They provide information about the various schemes, games and incentives offered with the products. Product knowledge and information makes kids mind. 6. 6) In case of movie calculated p-value <0.05, so null hypothesis is rejected i.e. movie affect the behavior of kids. Nowadays movie is new marketing strategy to cater the kids attention. Covert advertising and product placement are the strong medium to promote the products by music dance, actors, brand logos etc. It helps kids to recall the products. So Kids emulate their favorite stars their clothes, behavior and habits. 7. 7) For newspaper the calculated p-value >0.05 i.e. null hypothesis is not rejected. It has found by study that newspapers are not very popular among kids. Generally kids don t have reading habits at this age. It is not easy for them to retain the information provided by newspapers. 8. 8) For hoardings the calculated p-value >0.05 i.e. null hypothesis is not rejected. It has found that kids are not able to memorize the information displayed/showed on the hoardings. Printed statement, lack of appeal, non verbal communications are the problem to recall the ads. Hence print media has less influence on kids buying behaviour. Table 2.2 has shown different ways which helps Kids to retain and recall the information and makes their opinion about buying decisions. 1. In case of ad jingles calculated p-value <0.05 so null hypothesis is rejected. It implies that music and jingles are the most striking features of ads. As music is liked by kids of all ages they react spontaneously to it. Children who are not able to understand the information provided by ads, gets attracted by jingles. They can memorize jingles faster than nursery poems. Hit music scores and catchy lyrics help them to recall the products. 2. In case of demand of product that having animated characters calculated p-value <0.05 so null hypothesis is rejected. It has found that animated characters are most popular among kids of all ages. They feel emotional bonding and attachment with these characters. The arrival of kids channels has brought the flood of these characters like doremon, chota bheem mickey mouse, nemo, Pluto, aladin, tom & jerry etc. These characters develop favourable attitude towards the products and influence their future behaviour. 3. In case of child based ads/programmes calculated p-value <0.05 so null hypothesis is rejected. Result implies that nowadays children based programmes become a strong medium for drawing attention of kids. Different channels have launched many reality shows, based on kids. In these shows they use different quizzes, promotion activities to lure kids. Many celebrities come up to encourage them as well as endorse their products. So these types of programmes make kids more tending towards products. 4. In case of demand of peer influenced products calculated p-value <0.05 so null hypothesis is rejected. It was found that nowadays many parents are working and they have less time to spend with their children due to their job and household responsibilities. They compensate this by providing them more facilities. Kids get more exposure from their peers, friends and classmates so they have more knowledge than their parents.

6 5. In case of familiarity of retail outlets calculated p-value <0.05 so null hypothesis is rejected. It was found that today kids are aware about the availability of the products in the retail outlets those broadcasted over t.v. Mall culture and internet makes this availability much easier. 6. In case of recalling brands calculated p-value <0.05 so null hypothesis is rejected. Result implies that today kids are aware about brands. They can easily recognize brand logos, symbols. Growing population with dual income and single child families has led to increase in disposable income that reflects in parents spending on their kids. So kids are becoming brand conscious. Many leading company have launched different brands for kids like Raymond s ZAPP, Giny & Jony, Levi s Sykes Junior, Pantaloon etc. Reeebok has tied up with cartoon network for promoting their products. Cartoon characters and bollywood stars are big influencers for brand recall. Conclusion This research has showed that kids in Indore city have high influence of media. Both parents are working these days which results in lack of time with kids. Thus kids are more involved in internet, T.V.etc. Kids spend most of their time with media in one way or the other. Today kids have become very strong mode of potential customers for all brands whether directly or indirectly. Kids have good pocket money as families have high disposable income today they are themselves direct customers. For other purchases which are beyond kid s pocket money they force their parents to buy. Media influences kids so strongly that they know what they wish to have. Media influences their everyday life very deeply and has become a strong influencing factor of modern day kids. References 1. Bachmann, G.R., John, D.R. and Rao, A.R. (1993),Children's susceptibility to peer group purchase influence: An exploratory investigation. Advances in Consumer Research, 20, pp Belch,G., Belch M.A. and Ceresino G.(1985), Parental and Teenage Influences in Family Decision Making. Journal of Business Research,13 (April), Berns, R. M. (2004). Child, Family, School, Community: Socialization and Support (6th ed.) David, R. and Roseborough, H. (1955), Careers and Consumer Behavior. 5. In: Clark, L. ed., Consumer Behavior. New York: New York University Press. 6. Dotson, M.J. and Haytt, E.M. (2005), Major influence factors in children's consumer socialization, Journal of Consumer Marketing, 22 (1), pp Goldstein, J Children and advertising the research. Young Consumers: Insight and Ideas for Responsible Marketers, 1, Kunkel, D., B.L. Wilcox, J. Cantor, E. Palmer, S. Linn, and P. Dowrick Psychological Issues in the Increasing Commercialization of Childhood. Report of The APA Task Force on Advertising and Children. 9. McNeal, J.U. and C.H. Yeh Development of Consumer Behavior Patterns among Chinese Children. 14 (1), Journal of Consumer Marketing, Moschis, G.P. and Moore, R.L. (1982), A longitudinal study of television advertising effects, Journal of Consumer Research, 9 (December), pp Moore, E.S. and Lutz,R.J Children, Advertising and Product Experiences: A Multi-method Inquiry,Journal of Consumer Research, 27 (June), O'Guinn, T.C. and Shrum, L.J. (1997), The role of television in the construction of consumer reality, Journal of Consumer Research, 23 (March), pp Schulman, Y. and Clancy, K. (1992), Adults and children, a real gap, Adweek, 33 (February), pp. 48.

7 14. Parsons, T., Bales, R.F. and Shils, E.A. (1953), Working Papers in the Theory of Action. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press. 15. Shim, S., L. Snyder, and K.C. Gehrt Parents' Perception Regarding Children's Use of Clothing Evaluative Criteria: An Exploratory Study from the Consumer Socialization Process Perspective. Advances in Consumer Research, 22, Khattri, Varsha July 2011 Marketers in kids gloves BVIMR Management Edge;2011 Academic Journal, Vol. 4 Issue 2, p WILLIAMS, L. A. & VEECK, A An exploratory study of children's purchase influence in urban China. Asia Pacific Advances in Consumer Research, 3, Winick, M. P., & Winick, C. (1979). The television experience: What children see: Sage Publications Beverly Hills. Tables Table 1.1 Descriptive Statistics of Media Factors Particulars/Factors Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean Celebrity Endorsement Peer Pressure Visit to Malls Internet Search engine T.V Movie Newspapers & Magazines Hoarding N=200 Table 1.2 Impact of Dimensions of Media on Kids

8 Test Value = 3 Particulars /Factors t p-value Null Hypothesis Celebrity Endorsement 7.119*.000 Rejected Peer Pressure 8.491*.000 Rejected Visit to Malls 7.668*.000 Rejected Internet Search Engine 3.625*.000 Rejected T.V *.000 Rejected Movie 6.439*.000 Rejected Newspapers &Magazines Not Rejected Hoarding Not Rejected *Significant at 5% level Table 2.1 Descriptive Statistics of Kids Recalling Factors Particulars/Factors Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean Recalling/Repetition of Jingles/punch lines Demand of product that having animated Characters Memorize child based ads/programmes Demand of those products that are used by peers Familiarity about outlets of the advertised products Recalling of Brands that used frequently N=200

9 Table 2.2 Dimensions of kids Recalling Factors Test Value = 3 Particulars /Factors t p-value Null Hypothesis Recalling/Repitition of Jingles/punch lines Rejected Demand of product that having animated Rejected Characters Memorize child based ads/programmes Rejected Demand of those products that are used by Rejected peers Familiarity about outlets of the advertised Rejected products Recalling of Brands that used frequently Rejected *Significant at 5% level