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The purpose of this paper is to examine how the introduction of auditory sensory cues, through a human voice, affect children’s and parent’s shopping behaviour in a retail grocery setting. In the field of retailing and sensory marketing research, there is a paucity of knowledge on how auditory sensory cues impact on consumers’ shopping behaviour.

The empirical study was a field experiment and entailed direct observation of shoppers of the Swedish grocery retailer ICA. The observations were based on a convenience sample of shopping families assigned to a control group (n=200) and an experimental group (n=131). A new innovative Swedish audio story track system was to be tested in a hypermarket containing 13 different stories for children.

Auditory sensory cues affect children’s and parent’s shopping behaviour in a significant way. Children are quieter, more relaxed and do not move around and reduce the parental stress behaviour during the shopping process.

The findings demonstrate that auditory sensory cues through human voice have a positive effect on children’s and parent’s shopping behaviour. It is also obvious that parent’s perceived stress is significantly influenced by the children.

The study provides guidelines for grocery retailers who wish to offer children and their parents a more pleasant shopping trip by emphasizing the role of the children.

The research demonstrates that the introduction of auditory sensory cues through human voice in a significant way affect the children’s and their parent’s shopping behaviour in a retail setting.

Marketers try to influence food shopping behaviour of children through various in-store food promotional strategies (FPS). These in-store FPS comprise of attractive packaging, accessibility, availability of foods in wide varieties and presence of helpful and friendly sales personnel. However, little is known about how children buy and the extent to which these marketing strategies are successful. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to investigate food shopping behaviour of children in retail stores and to study the effectiveness of in-store FPS and demographic factors (age and gender of child and monthly family income) on food shopping behaviour of children.

Data have been collected from 473 mothers of children in age category four to 11 years. Data have been analysed through descriptive statistics (means and standard deviations), bivariate correlations, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical regression analysis.

The study explores and validates four factor structure of food shopping behaviour of children in retail stores in Indian settings. These factors include children’s active assessment of foods, impact of availability and variety on children’s purchases, influence of TV food ads on children’s purchases and influence of packaging on children’s food purchases. Further, the findings also reveal that in-store FPS are truly effective in influencing food shopping behaviour of children.

Marketers may highlight packaging attributes in food advertisements as they can help escalate food purchase requests of children in retail stores. In addition to this, food advertising is strongly associated with assessment of foods in retail stores and looking for availability of advertised foods in retail stores. This suggests that food advertising as a medium of communication should not be ignored. However, sales personnel can also be used more effectively as they are seen to help children in identifying availability and variety of foods in retail stores.

As no such study has been conducted so far (to the best of researcher’s knowledge), this study potentially helps in bridging gaps in literature.

The aim of this study is to determine the factors affecting the consumer preferences and behaviour in the children's clothing market in Turkey, a country where the majority of the population is under 18 years old.

Whilst the study investigated the purchasing preferences and behaviour of parents, such as shopping frequency and period, type of retailer and the effect of reference groups in the children's clothing market, it also explored some children's purchasing characteristics, like shopping decision age.

This study offers some academic results on consumer behaviour and preferences in the children's clothing market: There is no set shopping period; consumers prefer shopping from independent shops; in the selection of retailers, consumers consider payment conditions, pricing, and range of merchandise; in the family the parents mostly make the buying decisions for their children's clothes; the age of children making their own clothing decisions varies between six and ten; the most important factors affecting consumers' decisions towards shopping for children's clothing are the price, quality, convenience, payment conditions, and size of the clothing.

The study concentrated on consumer behaviour and preferences regarding children's clothing in a limited population – Izmir, a city of three million.

There are few studies related to children in the literature. For the first time, this study has attempted to explore the growing children's clothing market in Turkey.

This paper aims to analyse how children behave during a purchasing process in a simulated shop and how they put their goals into effect at the Point of Sale (POS). The focus of this research is children in Germany aged between 8 and 10 years. The results reveal answers to the following questions: which criteria do the children consider important when buying groceries? How efficiently and effectively do children pursue the goals demanded of them at the POS? This knowledge can support parents, teachers and educational organisations in teaching children consumer literacy.

Data were collected through interviews and a subsequent observation of the behaviour in a purchase simulation. A total of 436 school children aged 8 to 10 years answered a questionnaire about their behaviour at the POS and perceived demands during the purchasing process as well as their understanding of purchase-relevant concepts. Subsequently, purchase behaviour and decisions in a digitally simulated shopping environment of a supermarket were analysed for a subsample (n = 170). This combination of methods enables the collection of observable decision-making behaviour as well as of the declarative knowledge and the purchasing habits of the children.

Children often act differently from the way they themselves intended and expected during the purchase decision at the POS. Only a small number of children behaved purposefully, whereas the vast majority was distracted by the great amount of stimuli in the simulated supermarket. The results reveal factors that helped children cope with the shopping task and shielded them against purchase impulses from the stimuli at the POS.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to combine questionnaires about children’s declarative knowledge of the shopping process with observation of the real decision behaviour in a supermarket simulation task.

This paper investigates children's influence on their mothers' online grocery shopping. As virtual shopping does not provide instant gratification, the authors explore how children between the ages of 7 and 11 are involved in the online purchasing process (before, during and after the purchase) with their digital mothers (digimums).

We collected qualitative data from 27 separate semi-structured interviews of mothers and their children.

Children's influence during the online buying process exists and can be active, passive and/or proactive. The findings extend knowledge about children's influence by adding the notion of proactive influence where children use an intended approach to anticipate their mother's needs for grocery shopping and take initiatives. Children use less impulsive requests and become smart shoppers using more rational arguments to explain their requests. The online buying process contributes to children's online socialisation: They learn the importance of the shopping list, prices, discounts, brands and so on. Online socialisation at home might take the physical form of using digital devices (i.e. scanning) and entering the credit card code, which contributes to the children's learning.

Online buying virtualises children's relationship to objects, and the screen acts as a kind of filter. This makes their influence strategy less emotional and corporeal and more rational (smart shopper).

The purpose of this study is to comprehensively uncover antecedents of food shopping behaviour of children in retail stores in India. Children form the pivot of food marketing. They accompany parents on food shopping trips and assist food purchases. Their extent of participation varies with the frequency with which they accompany parents, the presence of food promotions and other demographic variables. The present paper attempts to comprehensively uncover the variables that help in cumulatively predicting food shopping behaviour of children in retail stores.

Data have been collected from 473 mothers of children in the age category 4-11 years. For the aforesaid purpose, a structured, pre-tested and non-disguised questionnaire has been prepared. Binary logistic regression has been applied to analyse the data through SPSS 19.

Shopping behaviour of children in retail stores significantly depends upon food promotions in retail stores, frequency with which children accompany mothers on shopping trips and demographic variables such as age of mother and father and education status of mother.

This study attracts attention of parents, food retailers and policy makers towards impact of food promotional strategies on food buying behaviour of children in retail stores.

This piece of research is important as no such study (to the best of researchers’ knowledge) has been conducted in India even when food retailing is an important component of total retail in India and also growing tremendously.

This study aims to propose increasing the number of dimensions around current intergenerational influence (IGI) construct and renaming it to intergenerational brand influence (IGBI). This research describes the development and validation of the items comprising the dimensions of this new construct.

This study performed a literature review to identify potential dimensions for IGBI based on previous research about IGI. Analysis of items used to measure IGI was conducted to establish a set for each dimension. A structured, self-administered survey was used. Item reduction, measure validation and regression analysis were conducted to measure the predictive validity of the instrument. Moreover, three separate studies were conducted to develop and validate IGBI construct.

IGBI quantifies the various interactions that contribute to intergenerational brand transfer. The interactions could be classified according to one of the five IGBI dimensions: communication, recommendation, observed behavior, good impression and co-shopping with parents.

IGBI recognizes the relevance of influence behaviors such as children observing their parents buy a brand, children participating in shopping and children attempting to develop a good impression through brand loyalty. The first two behaviors indicate the importance of brands advocating purchase behavior as a family activity. The measure of good impression suggests that consumers use brands to maintain family connections, which should be considered a pertinent brand strategy.

This study develops the aforementioned five IGBI dimensions that describe the interactions between parent–child consumers that result in brand transfer.

Young children, often called as teenagers (13-14 years) and tweenaged (8-12 years), are the new potential game changers for the big corporate. This paper aims to analyze Arab children’s influence for various products and services and across different buying process stages. The primary survey was conducted to capture a child’s role in family decision-making by analyzing their consumer socialization, influencing strategies and their influence across various products and buying stages.

Based on the review and the research gap, a bilingual questionnaire in English and Arabic language was developed. The research study was organized in three stages. It commenced with a pilot study conducted with ten school students in the age group of 8-10 years. The second stage involved contact with the schools by telephone to brief them on the purpose of the study and to request the participation of their students. The last stage was based on the survey conducted in the time period of September-November 2016-17.

Almost 25 per cent of the children surveyed prefer to buy stationary and books after discussing with their parents. On the other hand, food/beverage is one particular item where children go ahead and buy theses item themselves even without discussing with their parents (42.50 per cent of the total respondents). As per children’s perception, they are most influential in the final decision stage (mean = 1.84 and SD = 0.499), followed by search and evaluation stage (mean = 1.80 and SD = 0.441) and start stage (mean = 1.79 and SD = 0.488).

Further research is needed in Arab countries, especially with parents of different social status, as their shopping behaviour is expected to differ. Also, as this analysis is based on child’s perception, parents’ views must also be analyzed for better results.

The is the first-of-its-kind research in the Gulf region. This empirical research highlights the need for global marketers to understand the distinct features and identity of a young Arab consumer. Despite Oman being a very traditional culture which emphasizes on conformity to group norms and social acceptance and hence confirms to collectivistic culture, where kids are supposed to be obedient, there is this new wave of super energetic, more informed young kids who take their own consumer decisions.

After going through the extensive literature review of different countries/cultures, there has been very clear understanding that despite being an important family member, almost no research has been focussed on kids in gulf nations.

The purpose of this article is to examine how often urban children in mainland China interact with different types of retail shops, how they learn about new products and services, and their attitudes toward different sources of product information.

A survey of 965 urban children ages six to 13 in four Chinese cities, including Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing and Shanghai, was conducted in November 2003 to May 2004. Questionnaires were distributed through eight elementary schools and local researchers were appointed to administer the data collection.

The three most popular retail shops among urban Chinese children were bookstores/stationery stores, supermarkets, and restaurants and fast food shops. Store visits and consumption varied greatly with age and gender. Generally speaking, urban children perceived personal sources as useful as, and more credible than commercial sources in obtaining information about new products and services. Older children found commercial sources more useful and credible than younger children. Older children also found more information sources useful than younger children.

Three of the four surveyed cities were highly advanced in terms of economical and advertising development when compared with all other Chinese cities.

A very useful advice for marketers and advertisers to select the right type of retail outlets and media to reach urban Chinese children. Internet and children's print media can be good potential media for promotion.

This paper offers insight to design retail and media strategies to disseminate new product information to urban children in China.

By the end of this chapter on minors, internet-enabled devices and online shopping behaviour, readers will be able to

• Identify fundamental benefits and harm engendered when minors have unlimited access to internet-enabled devices

• Locate the main catalysts of benefit and harm to minors due to internet usage

• Show how a priori studies have created a rich and balanced narrative in the field of benefits and harm of the internet to minors

• Argue how the benefits outweigh the harm (or vice versa) impacting on minors in unlimited use of the internet

• Develop strategies to enhance the benefits and limit the harm caused by unlimited access to the internet

Identify fundamental benefits and harm engendered when minors have unlimited access to internet-enabled devices

Locate the main catalysts of benefit and harm to minors due to internet usage

Show how a priori studies have created a rich and balanced narrative in the field of benefits and harm of the internet to minors

Argue how the benefits outweigh the harm (or vice versa) impacting on minors in unlimited use of the internet

Develop strategies to enhance the benefits and limit the harm caused by unlimited access to the internet