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The purpose of this paper is to see if edutainment containing only healthy food can change children’s preferences and food choices toward healthy eating, especially in overweight or obese children, and if the children’s self-regulation, emotional overeating and parents that use food as a reward would influence those changes. This is important because childhood obesity is one of the biggest public health problems of the 21st century.

The authors conducted a study in two public schools (total 189 children) with a between-subjects experimental design (control vs experimental group), where children in experimental group watched an episode of Nutri Ventures series without unhealthy foods.

The results showed no differences in both children’s preferences and children’s food choices between the control and experimental group, with exception of older children, and contrary to our expectations. Older children in the experimental group chose more unhealthy food than children in the control group. The authors also saw differences in food choices between “emotional overeating” groups, where the children in “high” group tended to choose less healthy food items, especially in the experimental group of children. This leads the authors to believe that isolated edutainment may not be enough to change preferences and food choices; instead it might even have an opposite effect.

This study aimed to identify if edutainment containing only healthy food could be more effective in childhood obesity prevention but instead it showed how complex the whole topic can be.

The purpose of this study is to understand the magnitude of the impact advergames have on children’s preferences and choices for unhealthy products and brands, in terms of time of exposure (immediate vs delayed) and number of exposures (single vs repeated exposure). Past literature has focused essentially on the immediate effects of single exposures to advergames. Few studies explored the delayed or repetition effects and found wear-out effects of multiple exposure and also no delayed effects of single exposure. Therefore, this study will reduce the existent gap in the literature by studying simultaneously both effects.

A sample of 104 children aged 6-9 years old was used, divided into three groups (no exposure/single exposure/repeated exposure) in an experimental between-subjects design setting.

The results confirm the existence of all the expected effects: exposure to advergames has immediate and longer effects on a child’s preferences and choices of the brand depicted in the advergame and in that product category. Repeated exposure to the advergame enhances all the effects on the brand, but not on the product category.

Although earlier literature has already analyzed time and repetition effects on traditional media, or sought to analyze effects of advergames but with an adult sample, this article highlights the extent of these effects with children, and based on these results, reflects on the ethicality of using advergames with children on products high in fat, salt and/or sugar.

The aim of this study is to assess and compare consumer skills of institutionalized children with those of family children. This paper also seeks to understand which skills might be more easily improved amongst institutionalized children with a single intervention of classroom instruction.

This paper conducted a pilot study with a sample composed of two subgroups (38 institutionalized children and 36 non-institutionalized children). To assess children’s knowledge, a questionnaire and an interview were used. The class intervention lasted 30 minutes.

Results suggest that institutionalized children have lower levels of knowledge regarding consumption-related practices and lower levels of accuracy at estimating prices than non-institutionalized children. Results also showed that, in other skills, there are no differences between institutionalized or family children, as in attitude toward advertising or in making decisions based on price/quantity evaluations or based on the use of the same strategy in different situations. Regarding the class intervention, it was concluded that it could improve the attitude toward advertising of only the institutionalized children.

There is much research today focused on children’s ability to act as educated consumers. This research is focused mainly on children who live with their parents, but it is also important to take into consideration children who do not live in a typical family environment, the institutionalized children, because they will also become consumers. Research on institutionalized children is focused on evaluating their development and well-being and does not assess consumer competencies and skills.

This paper aims to outline the role of brands as relationship builders and to offer a better understanding of the recent developments and key literature in the area of consumer–brand relationships.

This paper is an editorial based mainly on a literature review on consumer–brand relationships. It uses the sentiment range and passion intensity to position various brand relationship constructs. This work follows the same bibliometric-analysis approach used by Fetscherin and Heinrich (2014) and looked for publications in the Web of Science on brand relationships, with reference to Fournier’s (1998) seminal work and data collected for the period between January 2010 and November 2018.

First, this work presents the key consumer–brand relationship terms and positions the work on brand love, brand like, brand hate, brand dislike and brand indifference. In addition, the bibliometric analysis offers a number of insights into the current state of the academic research in the area of consumer–brand relationships, including a clear indication that the research on consumer–brand relationships is increasing.

This work and the whole special issue together help in the understanding of brands as relationship builders, clearly explaining the continuum from strong positive or negative relationships with brands to no relationship with brands and the current state of research in the area.