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Ramblings
Kids:
They Just Do It
Payal adores her Barbie, Sanika just loves her Cargo pants and thinks its hep, Rituparn wants to be like Hrithik and enjoys the Coke anyway. These are all a part of a growing breed of youngsters called Tweens, who hate to be kids yet, much younger than adolescent teens. They love to shop, who does not want to shop? Especially when it comes to chocolates, ice- cream, fancy clothes and toys. Thus for tweens, the market is a fun filled place where they play, eat, hip-hop and shop. They have come of age and today they are customers, buyers, spenders, shoppers' etc Today’s tween is an extremely self-reliant youngster, market savvy and has money to spend.
Earlier parents were responsible for the shopping for the children and they decided what their children would like to have, but no longer now. Times have changed, and KID-CUSTOMER has arrived. Over the years, tweens have become a potent force in the market place, worth Millions of Rupees!!. They are confident, are big spenders and are able to find their way about in the market place. They often
favor stores that are child friendly, preferred by parents, and stock the desired products in depth.
Tweens are more comfortable with visual images than they are with words. When asked, "To draw what comes to their mind when they think of going shopping " they provided rich results, which were more expressive as compared to the verbal responses.
The pictures in the their minds that are being reproduced in their drawings are the basic images and pictures of the shopping area, stores/shops, and the items they crave for or wish to buy. Consciously managing these images among them will definitely help in building a customer base for the future when these children are at their peak as adult spenders. Moreover, the drawings depict their shopping experience brought out their perceptions of product types, brand names, even packaging apart from store- related
colors, sizes, layouts, contents etc.
When it comes to what do they like to buy the most, kids drew a great variety of products complete with brand names and packaging
colors. They depicted more than 200 products and 40 product types ranging from chocolates to dresses to goggles to even mobile phones and computers.
As an overall category, food products topped the list by accounting for 36.04 % of the total products desired, followed by toys (29.28%) and apparel & accessories (20.27%)
Ice creams topped the popularity charts at 11% where as chocolates came second with 8.11%. Amul, Cornetto, Feast, Cadburys and Nestle were the brands that caught their imaginations.
However, girls showed more liking for ice creams (75%) as against boys (69%).
When viewed, based on the incidence of illustration in the individual samples, it was found that more boys depicted soft drinks (62%) than girls (25%). Pepsi and Coke being the prominent brands mentioned. True "Yeh Dil Mange
More"
Over all Boys seem to desire many more things, an average of 9.5 products, than girls who illustrated an average of 5 products. Moreover gender differences are visible as girls were interested in dolls, jewelry, and feminine products, while boys always went gunning for toy guns, hockey sticks, video games, cars, CD players and electronic gizmos.
Tweens tend to be very brand conscious and value certain brands too. Brand name depiction incidence as a percentage of total products illustrated stood at 31%. High brand association was found in case of chocolates and ice reams-100%, followed by sugar confectionery-50%. Interestingly cricket bats showed a high brand name association not with the manufacturer's brand but with MRF. This is because Sachin, on his bat uses MRF logo. They begin developing brand and store preferences quite early in life. Hence, retailers should reach out to kids early to build awareness and liking among them and thus to convert them as customers in later stages of life.
It was found that children with working mothers while accounting for 24% of
the e sample studied in all accounted for 31% of the brand names named in the drawings. It can be assumed that these kids are more independent and are more exposed to mass media especially TV for a longer duration as compared to kids with non-working mothers. Brand name depiction was thus 40% among such children as against 29% among the non-working mothers.
Price as a part of product packaging or in the form of price tags did not appear to be of significant recall to them when drawing what they would like to buy. They are not very concerned about the price as long as they get what they wished. Interestingly they have illustrated packaging details too, and it was interesting to note that they have given exact
color and font types of the brand names of the products.
Marketers should believe that kids are their future customers as well, and hence they should try to cultivate children patronage so that they will favor the firms ’ offerings when they become adults. After all selling to them is not child's play.
Thus, the mantra is to get into their shoes: try to think like them, behave like them, even throw tantrums and try to appease their parents too.
In short do what the tweens do and just as they do!
� Dwarika
Prasad Uniyal
December 21, 2000
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