Children’s understanding of the selling versus persuasive intent of junk food advertising: Implications for regulation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.01.018Get rights and content

Abstract

Evidence suggests that until 8 years of age most children are cognitively incapable of appreciating the commercial purpose of television advertising and are particularly vulnerable to its persuasive techniques. After this age most children begin to describe the ‘selling’ intent of advertising and it is widely assumed this equips them with sufficient cognitive defences to protect against advertisers’ persuasion attempts. However, much of the previous literature has been criticised for failing to differentiate between children’s awareness of ‘selling’ versus ‘persuasive’ intent, the latter representing a more sophisticated understanding and superior cognitive defence. Unfortunately there is little literature to suggest at what age awareness of ‘persuasive intent’ emerges; our aim was to address this important issue. Children (n = 594) were recruited from each grade from Pre-primary (4–5 years) to Grade 7 (11–12 years) from ten primary schools in Perth, Western Australia and exposed to a McDonald’s television advertisement. Understanding the purpose of television advertising was assessed both nonverbally (picture indication) and verbally (small discussion groups of 3–4), with particular distinction made between selling versus persuasive intent. Consistent with previous literature, a majority of children described the ‘selling’ intent of television advertising by 7–8 years both nonverbally and verbally, increasing to 90% by 11–12 years. Awareness of ‘persuasive’ intent emerged slowly as a function of age but even by our oldest age-group was only 40%. Vulnerability to television advertising may persist until children are far older than previously thought. These findings have important implications regarding the debate surrounding regulation of junk food (and other) advertising aimed at children.

Highlights

► Most children’s understanding of the ‘selling intent’ of television food advertising emerged at around 7–8 years, reaching 90% by 11–12 years. ► However, higher order understanding of the ‘persuasive intent’ of advertising (i.e., trying to get someone to do something they might otherwise not) emerged much later and even by 11–12 years was still only described by 40% of our children. ► These data suggest children might be vulnerable to television food advertising until much older than previously assumed.

Introduction

For the past several decades childhood obesity rates around the world have been increasing in a seemingly inexorable fashion (de Onis, Blossner, & Borghi, 2010). As energy-dense, nutrition-poor foods are typically advertised heavily in children’s television timeslots there has been a natural interest in determining the extent to which the promotion of such foods has contributed towards increases in childhood obesity (Chapman et al., 2006, Kelly et al., 2007). Several major scientific reviews conclude that food advertising contributes towards childhood obesity by distorting children’s food preferences, requests, consumption patterns and nutrition knowledge (Cairns et al., 2009, Hastings et al., 2003).

Developmental research demonstrates that most children below the ages of 7–8 years find it difficult to take the perspective of others, such that they have little cognitive capacity to appreciate and defend against food advertising’s attempts to entice them (Kunkel et al., 2004, Moses and Baldwin, 2005). Although the nomenclature varies, a number of stages towards the development of cognitive defence are consistently described within the literature. These stages are characterised by: pre-recognition, where most children below 4–5 years fail to discern the difference between television advertising and program content; intermission intent, where children believe advertisements are ‘so you go to the toilet’, ‘get something to eat’ or ‘to give the actors a rest’; informative intent, where children view advertising as a (trustworthy and non-biased) source of information about the availability of products; and selling intent, where children over 7–8 years generally recognise that the purpose of advertising is to ‘sell’ the advertised product (John, 1999, Kunkel et al., 2004).

Although there appears to be a developmental progression towards appreciation of selling intent, many children are observed to retain both naïve and more sophisticated beliefs simultaneously. For instance, children over the ages of 7–8 years frequently describe the selling intent of advertising while simultaneously retaining beliefs about its intermission and informative intent (Oates, Blades, Gunter, & Don, 2003).

Some researchers have questioned whether children’s capacity to recognise the selling intent of advertisements precedes their ability to verbally articulate such a relatively sophisticated concept. It has been suggested children as young as 2–3 years can successfully choose the correct picture from two options depicting selling intent at above chance levels (Donohue, Henke, & Donohue, 1980). However, the methodology behind this research has been roundly criticised (Kunkel et al., 2004) and subsequent experiments using a greater number of picture responses have failed to replicate the results and find that non-verbal awareness is actually quite similar to verbal awareness (Macklin, 1985, Macklin, 1987, Owen et al., 2007).

Given the weight of evidence, the American Psychological Association recommends no advertising should be directed towards children below the ages of 7–8 years because below this age most do not recognise the selling intent of advertising (Kunkel et al., 2004). However, others have demonstrated that even though children at ages 7–8 years are able to recognise the selling intent of advertising, they still process advertising with simple and unsophisticated skill when compared to older children aged 11–12 years (John, 1999, Moore and Lutz, 2000). The Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM) suggests children interpret, evaluate and respond to advertising’s influence attempts through a personal ‘persuasion knowledge’ based upon their life experiences (Friestad & Wright, 1994). An important aspect of this model is that it predicts that ‘persuasion knowledge’ continues to develop throughout childhood and well into adulthood.

This highlights a criticism of a number of reviewers that most researchers fail to clearly distinguish between children’s awareness of the selling intent of advertising versus a more sophisticated appreciation of its persuasive intent (Roberts, 1983, Wright et al., 2005, Young, 1990). These reviewers argue that recognition of persuasive intent, rather than selling intent, is the critical factor signifying children’s capacity for cognitive defence. The terms ‘selling’ and ‘persuasive’ intent are often treated interchangeably within the literature. However, Roberts (1983) distinguishes children’s conceptualisation of selling intent as the promotion of a product via presentation of its features and qualities in an essentially unbiased manner, compared to children’s more sophisticated appreciation of persuasive intent whereby advertisers attempt to increase their product’s desirability via appealing techniques. Children’s recognition of persuasive intent necessarily requires an appreciation of selling intent, but in addition, requires recognition that the advertiser is attempting to make viewers do something they might not otherwise do. Due to a lack of consistent nomenclature within the literature, it is difficult to determine at what age most children recognise the persuasive intent of advertising. It is almost certainly later in childhood than 7–8 years when appreciation of selling intent emerges, but how soon after remains far from clear. Oates et al. (2003) differentiated between ‘encourage to buy’, which emerged around 8 years, and ‘persuade to buy’, which emerged around 10 years. However they did not define these measures any further, nor did they report quantitative data.

The present study sought to address this gap in the extant literature by testing a large sample of school children aged 5–12 years to determine the crucial ages at which understanding of the selling versus persuasive intent of advertising emerges. Verbal methods based upon the work of Oates et al. (2003) were used to explore when children’s appreciation of the persuasive intent of advertising emerges. A pictorial response measure, based upon the revised work of Macklin (1987), was used to establish a baseline non-verbal comparison of selling intent within our sample.

Section snippets

Method

Children were recruited from ten primary schools within the Perth metropolitan area, stratified by socio-economic status (SES) deciles as suggested by the Australian Bureau of Statistics SEIFA index of disadvantage (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2008). In total 594 children of near equal numbers of male and female students (296 and 298 respectively) were recruited from the 10 schools. Within each school, up to eight children were tested per grade from Pre-primary (4–5 years) to Grade 7

Results

Fig. 2 shows the proportions of children in each grade selecting each of the five pictures in the non-verbal task. We considered that children who selected the mother and her children purchasing McDonald’s meals (#2) evidenced awareness of selling intent. The proportion of children nominating picture #2 clearly increased as a function of age. By 8–9 years of age, a majority of children selected picture #2 but it was not until our oldest age group at 11–12 years that it was selected by almost

Discussion

Our data confirm previous literature (Kunkel et al., 2004) in demonstrating a clear developmental progression in children’s ability to comprehend the intent of television advertising, with a majority of children being capable of both nonverbally indicating and verbally describing the selling intent of television advertising by around the age of 8 years. However, our study extends previous research by suggesting children’s understanding of the more sophisticated concept of persuasive intent does

Acknowledgements

The work was supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP0559419. We wish to acknowledge for their assistance in this study the students and staff of Bassendean, Brentwood, East Fremantle, Kelmscott, Midvale, Newborough, Padbury, Rossmoyne, Subiaco and South Lake primary schools.

References (21)

  • M. de Onis et al.

    Global prevalence and trends of overweight and obesity among preschool children

    American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

    (2010)
  • 2033.0.55.001-Socio-economic Indexes for areas (SEIFA)

    (2008)
  • G. Cairns et al.

    The extent, nature and effects of food promotion to children: A review of the evidence to December 2008

    (2009)
  • K. Chapman et al.

    How much food advertising is there on Australian television?

    Health Promotion International

    (2006)
  • T. Donohue et al.

    Do kids know what TV commercials intend?

    Journal of Advertising Research

    (1980)
  • M. Friestad et al.

    The persuasion knowledge model: how people cope with persuasion attempts

    Journal of Consumer Research

    (1994)
  • J. Harris et al.

    A crisis in the marketplace: how food marketing contributes to childhood obesity and what can be done

    Annual Review of Public Health

    (2009)
  • G. Hastings et al.

    Review of research on the effects of food promotion to children Glasgow

    (2003)
  • O. Holsti

    Content analysis for the social sciences and humanities

    (1969)
  • D. John

    Consumer socialization of children: a retrospective look at twenty-five years of research

    Journal of Consumer Research

    (1999)
There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (0)

View full text