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This article seeks to make a critical contribution to the contemporary debate on the active role of children as consumers, exploring the different meanings children confer on consumer goods and spaces in retail settings.

A total of 60 children were unobtrusively observed in ten Italian apparel stores.

Children tend to subvert the stores' possible uses and symbolizations by actively re‐appropriating the meanings of products, promotional stimuli and spaces through play.

The analysis of children's lived experience of commercial spaces enables retailers to adjust the stores' environment to children's demands, recognising their role as active meaning creators.

The playful re‐appropriation of spaces, products and promotional stimuli emerged as a mechanism through which children learn to consume, reinforcing their knowledge and attitudes about retail settings, products and brands.

The study aims to explore the evolving status of children as active consumers in the emerging Indian market by assessing their impact on family buying practices across distinct parental clusters.

The study uses a structured questionnaire to draw a quota sample of 136 urban Indian parents across four child segments from two Indian metropolitan cities to understand their attitudes towards parenting and the consequent empowerment of their children for actively participating in family purchase decisions around varied children’s product categories.

Exploratory factor analysis reveals five well-defined parental attitudes towards child rearing. The attitudinal factors are used to define three discrete parental clusters, namely, time-pressed parents, child-centric parents and socially influenced parents. The demographic and psychographic profiles of the clusters expose the significant influence of the educated and affluent parents in empowering their children as more active influencers/consumers. The role of children as independent buyers of eatables and toys over other categories is also re-established.

The diversity of Indian parents both in terms of their family structure and attitude towards parenting significantly deliver decisive signals for market-specific segmentation strategies. The uniformity in their shopping frequency and increasing child involvement in family purchases also highlight the opportunities ahead.

Empirical evidences on the growing role of children in family purchases and their transformation into active consumer in an evolving market adds to the existing under-represented family consumption literature with more market-specific insights.

A product colour plays an important role in consumers’ preferences. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the impact of the three-dimensional character of colour (brightness, saturation and vividness) on children’s behaviour towards a food product and as a source of well-being.

Two experiments were conducted. Study 1 was conducted with 62 children and used four visuals of syrup presenting two colours (red/green) and two variations of vividness (vivid/dim). Study 2 was conducted with 70 children and used four pictures of stewed apples and four pictures of pouches to test the influence of each dimension of colour on children’s preferences for the product and the product packaging.

Results show that the three-dimensional character of colour plays an important role in children’s gustatory inferences and well-being.

The study is restricted to one food product (in each study) habitually consumed by children. Other products could be investigated to show how colour can contribute to children’s well-being.

The paper addresses the issue of well-being as a potential brand-positioning element.

The paper suggests new avenues to use the brightness/saturation or vividness of a product or packaging colour as a potential element to arouse positive sensations that generate children’s well-being even when the product is not a preferred one.

This works initiates creative thinking concerning the impact of a product colour on children consumers.

This paper seeks to understand children’s responses to food waste in school by exploring children’s views on food waste and empowering them to discuss and develop their own solutions.

Using creative problem-solving approach and photovoice technique, the authors conducted focus group discussions with 28 primary school children in the UK.

Children have a clear understanding of the consequences of food waste for individuals, society and the environment. They displayed negative emotions concerning food waste and responded positively to the possibility of food recycling. Their solutions to reduce food waste will require multiple stakeholder engagement, including self-regulation, peer-monitoring, teacher supervision and family support. However, rather than relying on intervention schemes that require significant adult involvement, children placed a heavy emphasis on self-regulation, playing an active role in addressing food waste in school.

This research extends previous understanding, by showing children as agentic consumers who can shape food waste solutions in school. These findings are of use to primary teachers and local education authorities, to aid children in developing their own solutions to reduce food waste in their own schools.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of how the child consumer has been constructed in experience advertising in a historical perspective, how the view of the child has changed and how the presentation of the “good” experience has developed.

The study is based on ads in the Danish children's magazine Donald Duck. The study is a historical overview drawing on both quantitative and qualitative approaches, drawing theoretically on consumer, childhood and experience theory.

The results show that the “child consumer” has moved from being invisible on the backstage to the very front of the stage in experience advertising during the four decades examined. Moreover, the idea of what an experience is for the child has changed radically and a move occurs from a focus on aesthetic experiences to experiences of immersion and challenges of the senses. The most recent ads promote the child as not just the co‐creator but the actual creator of the experience.

It is a limitation that the study is based on a Danish sample only, and findings cannot be generalized to other national markets. It would, however, be interesting to compare with other national markets.

Marketing implications of the findings could be to go further into the direction of user generated experiences as suggested in the most recent ads, e.g. in the direction of online games where the consumer is him or herself writing the storyline of the experience unlike the pre‐planned rides most amusement parks offer today.

This study draws on child experience professionals, who have been found to be more proactive in recognizing the child consumer than, e.g. academics, and in translating the view of the children as actors to advertising copy and imagery. These marketing professionals have from early on addressed children in their own language clearly perceiving them as consumers in their own right. The most recent ads staging the consumer as creator of experiences challenge Pine and Gilmore's experience realms and call for a new way of conceptualizing and offering experiences. This is interesting for researchers working with perceptions of childhood and actors working with commercial conceptualizations of experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a selective and necessarily truncated history of the place and use of qualitative approaches in the study of children's consumption in order to provide some depth of understanding regarding differences between and commonalities of approaches employed by academic market researchers, social science researchers and, to a lesser extent, market practitioners.

The paper examines key research statements about children's consumption beginning in the 1930s to ascertain the underlying conception of the child informing the work.

It is argued that there has been a displacement of psychologically oriented, developmental conceptions of the child with sociological and anthropological conceptions resulting in an acceptance of the child as a more or less knowing, competent consumer. This shift has become manifest in a rise and acceptance of qualitative research on children's consumer behaviour by social science and marketing academics as well as by market practitioners such as market researchers.

Methods – here qualitative methods – must be seen as enactments of theories about conceptions of the person, rather than simply as neutral tools that uncover extant truths.

Attending to how one “constructs” the child may usefully inform debates about the harmfulness or usefulness of goods and messages directed to children.

This paper helps in understanding the long history of children as consumers, how they have been understood and approached by market and academic researchers interested in consumption and various ways conceptions of ‘the child’ can be used.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate a marketer-sponsored edutainment centre as a consumer socialisation agent by examining effects on preference for the sponsor brands and the degree of socialisation children experience.

Interviews were undertaken with 16 children in their analytical stage of development as well as one of their parents immediately prior, immediately after, and one week following a part-day visit to the heavily branded edutainment centre Kidzania.

Results suggest that children did experience consumer socialisation. There was a movement in brand preferences towards the sponsored brands. The children also demonstrated advances in transaction knowledge. Specifically, significant increases were found in product and brand knowledge, shopping scripts and retail knowledge, with some children moving beyond perceptual and analytical thought and demonstrating reflective thought. In contrast, most children did not demonstrate an analytical level of advertising and persuasion knowledge.

Findings are constrained by the children’s specific experiences and the aptitude of both the children as interviewees and the parents as observers/interpreters. Although delayed measures were used this does not necessarily confirm permanency of the effects.

This is the first study to date to examine a marketer-sponsored edutainment centre as a socialisation agent. Specifically, the study contributes to the understanding of this new, participatory form of marketing communications by demonstrating its value in achieving brand objectives while fostering the consumer socialisation of children.

The purpose of this study is to understand and explain the process by which child consumers form relationships with brands. Specifically, the authors attempt to understand how child consumers conceptualize brands, why and how they decide to engage in relationships with brands and why they decide to breakup with brands though sometimes reconcile with them.

A mixed methodology was followed in this research. On the basis of an ethnographic approach, ten in-depth interviews were conducted among 8-12-year-old girls. Subsequently, a survey was completed by 122 children (boys and girls) to quantitatively examine the hypotheses formulated after the qualitative phase.

Findings from both the qualitative and quantitative studies highlight and confirm that children conceptualize brands according to visual branding components, signs and promotional activities. Furthermore, children make moral evaluations of brand behaviors and judge them as “good” or “bad”. More importantly, the authors propose two typologies: one for the reasons children decide to engage in a positive relationship and another for why children engage in a negative relationship with a brand. Additionally, the authors found that children report having an active or passive relationship role according to the characteristics of the brand relationship. Moreover, despite their young age, children report having broken up relationships with several brands; the reasons are categorized into positive and negative breakups. Finally, the authors found that positive breakups lead to more probable brand relationship reconciliation than negative breakups.

Despite a vast body of literature in the child consumer behavior field, there is scarce research regarding brand relationship phenomena. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical research conducted with child consumers, addressing brand relationship formation, dissolution and reconciliation.

Despite years of research into consumer socialization, little research examines men’s roles in consumer socialization processes. The purpose of this paper is to attend to this gap and to investigate consumer socialization processes in single-father households.

To study consumer socialization processes, this paper develops its insights using grounded theory, deploying qualitative data to develop theory. The data include long interviews with both fathers and their children used to understand the processes of consumer socialization.

This paper finds six socialization processes: entrustment, entrainment, education, emprise, estrangement and elevation. These processes emerge based on different types of household resource gaps or aspects of men’s gender identity.

The main implications are to study the roles played by cultural context and family type in socialization processes. Studies could examine whether the processes uncovered here occur in other family settings, as well as whether they vary based on children’s age and gender.

Household brands, products and services could target resource-scarce households using appeals that portray offerings as a means to develop children’s responsibilities, independence and involvement in household management. Marketers could also use advertising appeals that depict playful product usage and learning situations or more broadly position brands as identity brands making them more appealing to men who are striving to be better fathers.

This paper uniquely identifies a number of previously uncovered consumer socialization processes, as well as factors that influence them.

By stepping outside of the consumer socialization model (Ward, 1974) which for many years has resembled a ‘body of verified truths’ when it comes to understanding the complex intimacy between young consumers’ identities and the marketplace, this research aims to offer a theoretical and empirical reconsideration of the tangible light and shade, indeterminacy and yet ambition in which these young adolescents’ consumption practices and social contexts are inextricably intertwined.

Five different data collection methods were employed; namely personal diaries, in-depth interviews (which were conducted at two separate intervals), accompanied shopping trips, e-collages and researcher diaries. Each method was chosen so as to fulfil a specific purpose and reflect a specific angle of repose on the lived experience and consumption practices of a liminar – those at the heart of marketing’s newest strategic boundary.

This chapter describes some of the constituent elements of metaconsumption; the proposed theorization of the liminars’ consumption practices and a suggested diversion from ‘the effects’ perspective on young consumers’ socialization.

This chapter adds to those which problematize the tendency to view young consumers’ interactions with consumption as measurable by having to pass through pre-defined stages if they are to become recognized as complete consumers. Instead this research aligns with the perspective that young consumers, like adults, must mediate the shifting milieus of their social lives through engagement with a myriad consumption practices.

This perspective responds to an acknowledged empirical dearth (e.g. Martens, Southerton, & Scott, 2004). However, secondly in line with Arnould & Thompson’s (2005) original motivation that CCT encapsulate those who see our discipline as ripe with the potential for new theory generation and widespread applicability, this research aligns micro understandings and theorizations of children’s social worlds and consumer culture practices with existing meso- and macro-levels of consumption theory.