Editorial

Citation

Brian Young, D. (2007), "Editorial", Young Consumers, Vol. 8 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/yc.2007.32108baa.001

Editorial

Welcome to Volume 8 Number 2 of Young Consumers. We are going from strength to strength and this quarter we have six academic papers and four practitioner contributions.

Our regular piece from Martin Lindstrom looks at the language of tweenies this week and how these kids are converging toward a universal language using communications like mobile phones.

Richard Helyar gives a fascinating insight into how a Channel 4 project developed into a study of youth tribes – descriptions of groups of young people self-generated and sustained by the members themselves and eventually generating a web-based database that is interesting to both the anthropologist of popular culture and marker researcher.

Andrea Geeson’s contribution is a plea to market researchers to take video research seriously and she argues a convincing case that research can positively benefit from using video as an essential part of its tool box as well as a vital presentational aid. Interestingly academics are also taking video seriously and recent Association for Consumer Research (ACR) proceedings will testify to this.

There is a new regular column from the Global Advertising Lawyer’s Alliance (GALA). We did have a similar column some issues ago where the legislation on children and advertising was examined country by country and now we have a careful examination by Candice Liu and her colleagues of the relevant legislation in China.

In more detail for the academic papers: Deriemaeker and his colleagues in Brussels have looked closely at the nutritional intake and physical performance of seven- to 12 year-old Flemish school students. This detailed study revealed that nutritional and physical activity habits were often rather poor. Studies like this one contribute to the growing body of data on problems with child overweight and obesity.

Hogan deals with the vexed question of how the media treats the toy industry. Here in the UK we have recently been on the receiving end of media criticism of Bratz dolls promoting precocious sexuality in children based on an American Psychological Association (APA) 67-page report on the sexualisation of girls with barely a quarter of a page (APA, 2007, p. 14) on that brand. Essential reading.

Anne Martensen from Copenhagen Business School gives an enthusiastic and carefully argued case that ten to 12-year-olds have a great deal of satisfaction with their mobile phones and that this possession has a vital and complex role to play in their emergent social identity. But although the product is indispensable, brand loyalty is low. The author concludes with some interesting suggestions for marketers so read on.

Wiley and his co-workers in New Zealand wanted to explore the marketing related effects of manipulating visual content of fashion advertising targeted toward nine to 11-year-old girls and systematically varied visual parameters of an ad for fashion clothes. This experimental paradigm influenced participants’ responses in some unexpected ways.

Shopping in India by young people is a relatively unexplored area and Kaur and Singh’s paper is a valuable original contribution. A useful review of the shopping literature is then followed by a factor analysis of the motives of 115 students.

Kara Chan is no stranger to Young Consumers and this latest paper with Cong Zhang surveyed 299 students in Beijing in order to look at the influence of peers and media celebrities on young people’s endorsement of materialistic values. As the Chinese culture is said to be collective, they expected that social relations, both personal and celebrity-mediated, play an important role in the establishment of consumption values. Not only did social comparison predict materialistic values but imitation of celebrities did as well.

These six papers all explore different cultures. We are truly international in outlook. Young adults are represented in two papers from the two of largest emerging economies in the world, India and China and the rest focus on “tweenies” who seem to be developing into one of the most interesting of all the child sectors. But over to you, and good reading.

Dr Brian YoungEditor