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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.

This paper aims not only to provide an insight into the nature of the relationship between parental financial role modelling and consumption behaviour of young people, but also to explore the consumer socialization process that children undergo in the parent‐child dyad.

Qualitative research in the form of personal in‐depth interviews was conducted in order to extract new knowledge and reach a greater understanding regarding the impact that this relationship may have on future consumption behaviours within the youth market.

It is clear that parents are able to exert a huge amount of influence over the financial behaviour of their children (although this obviously differs between families) and are able to do so through the informal teaching of financial lessons, by allowing children to observe their own financial patterns and by guiding their children through significant financial decisions by offering advice and approval (or disapproval) when asked. Key financial attitudes and behaviours of young home‐leavers are almost directly related to the parental financial education they received whilst growing up and still living at home and in many cases parental influence is still present even once the child has moved away from home and is responsible for making their own financial decisions.

Although there are limitations, the present study does have implications for the impact parents can have on the spending behaviour of their children; it may be that the most important thing parents can do is teach their children about financial responsibility and successful consumer decisions at a young age so that they grow up with these life skills.

In terms of practical implications, by identifying the specific areas where financial knowledge and awareness may be lacking, the research may help educational and financial institutions to design financial management courses in order to help young people achieve greater financial freedom.

The paper reveals the characteristics of the consumption relationship children enjoy with their parents, describing the role of financial education within families and conceptualising the various forms of consumption relationships that exist between young consumers and their parents.

The relationship between parental influence and youth consumption behaviour has already been identified using quantitative research methods but very little is known about the actual extent of this relationship, which is addressed by this paper.

Only a limited number of studies have examined the behaviour and the strategies of children and parents during shopping. This ethnographical study aims at thoroughly understanding family decision-making when shopping for groceries, especially children's and parents' negotiation strategies.

Using a qualitative ethnographical approach, seven known families were accompanied on 19 grocery shopping trips. Their behaviour, their interactions and their strategies during shopping were observed. Analysis was conducted by coding relevant information, defining categories, comparing data and identifying patterns.

The results show that children constantly influence their parents, directly and indirectly. They do this by displaying various behaviours in the grocery store. Their negotiation tactics are diverse, as are parents' reactions to their children's negotiation strategies. Children aim at fulfilling spontaneous desires while parents want to restrain their children's requests.

Limitations of the study can be found in their qualitative methodology.

This study has several implications for marketers. By learning about the joint decision-making process, companies as well as public policy makers will be able to address families more successfully and market healthy food more effectively.

This study contributes to existing research on family decision-making by presenting different ways of children and parents behaviour during shopping trips. It applied an unusual technique of observing well-known families on their shopping trips.

Describes research on the processes and outcomes of consumer socialisation; it investigates the importance of the family as the main socialisation agent for young children. Shows how parents influence child behaviour directly through instruction in consumer skills, indirectly as models of consumer behaviour, and by supervision of the child’s consumer opportunities; also by influencing cognitive abilities, motivating the child to use its cognitive abilities in consumer situations, and teaching consumer skills which are unrelated to cognitive ability. Relates changes in US family demographic patterns to children as consumers: more single‐parent families and working mothers may mean less contact and socialisation of children by parents, while greater ethnic diversity and mixed‐race families affects the way that children are socialised. Test four hypotheses: that parents of younger children engage in less direct instruction of consumer behaviours than parents of older children; that parents engage in more direct consumer instruction, co‐shopping and co‐viewing with daughters than with sons; that more highly educated parents engage in more direct consumer instruction, co‐shopping and co‐viewing than do parents with lower levels of education; and that ethnicity is a factor in parental consumer instruction, co‐shopping and co‐viewing. Discusses the results of the survey questionnaire used for this US study of parents with children between two and eight years old; the results roughly confirm the first three of these four hypotheses.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the theoretical background of the involvement and the entertainment of children of four to seven years of age in the purchase process at Hungarian retail stores. It also examines the practice of local and foreign retailers in Hungary.

A review of literature is followed by the description of an exploratory study as well as its findings. The study contained two distinct phases: first 160 retail stores which were selling goods to children (exclusively or together with products for adults) were randomly selected and observed, and then 120 face-to-face or mini group interviews were made with Hungarian children.

At the moment retail store managers in Hungary do not recognise that children can, and often do affect the length of time their parents spend in retail stores and that children also exert influence on their parents’ purchase decisions and behaviour. Retail store managers rarely provide any entertainment for children and involve them in the shopping experience and even when they do, they fail to do it in the right way. Also, store personnel do not have the right mentality towards children. The study also reveals that children do not wish to have sophisticated or expensive games during the purchase process, but instead would like to be actively involved in the shopping experience by completing little “missions” or “challenges”.

On the basis of the research results it becomes clear that creatively designed involvement and entertainment of children in retail stores would encourage families to spend more time spent in retail stores and may serve to increased sales. It would however presume collaboration between retail stores and the producers of toys and creative accessories.

The paper aims to address the rarely and sporadically analysed question of how retail managers should entertain and involve young children in the process of shopping. The exploratory study sheds light on the big gap between what is offered by the retail management and what is expected by the young children during shopping in Hungary. It also points to the apparent lack of attention and awareness amongst retailers concerning the influence that children have on parents during the shopping process.

This research analyses the in‐store behaviour of children and their parents while shopping for children’s clothing. Data were collected by unobtrusively observing and recording the behavior of parents and children in retail stores. Results indicate that a purchase was more likely where both parties were highly involved in the search, the interaction was collaborative, the parent had positive evaluations of quality, price, practicality and style, the child had positive evaluations of price, style and colour, and the salesperson addressed the needs of both the parent and the child. It is recommended that retailers′ strategies for merchandise selection, salesforce training and in‐store promotions, address the needs of both parent and child.

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of co-playing as a moderator of the relation between parents’ and children’s play of violent video games.

The study uses dyadic parent/child survey data to estimate the conditional effects in the model, both direct and indirect.

The positive effect of parents’ violent video game play of children’s playing behaviors is attenuated by parent/child co-playing. Parents’ knowledge of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) ratings leads to higher levels of co-playing, thereby indirectly attenuating violent video game play in children as driven by parents’ play.

The paper extends the literature on consumer socialization and the impact of co-playing and identifies an antecedent for co-playing in this context.

The paper reveals that knowledge of the self-regulatory ESRB rules plays a valuable (indirect) role in mitigating violent video game play by children through an increase in co-playing, which attenuates the positive effect of parents’ play on children’s play.

The study incorporates data from both parents and children to investigate the relationship between parents and children’s violent video game play while empirically investigating the uncertainty in the literature concerning the moderating impact of co-playing.

This paper aims to explore the parental role in children’s food socialization. More specifically, it explores how the legacy of the past (i.e. experiences from the participant’s own childhood) works to inform how parents, in turn, socialize their own children within the context of food, drawing on theories of consumer socialization, intergenerational influence and emotional reflexivity.

To seek further understanding of how temporal elements of intergenerational influence persist (through the lens of emotional reflexivity), the authors collected qualitative and interpretative data from 30 parents from the UK using a combination of existential–phenomenological interviews, photo-elicitation techniques and accompanied grocery shopping trips (observational interviews).

Through intergenerational reflexivity, parents are found to make a conscious effort to either “sustain” or “disregard” particular food practices learnt from the previous generation with their children (abandoning or mimicking the behaviours of their own parents within the context of food socialization). Factors contributing to the disregarding of food behaviours (new influencer, self-learning and resistance to parental power) emerge. A continuum of parents is identified, ranging from the “traditionalist” to “improver” and the “revisionist”.

By adopting a unique approach in exploring the dynamic of intergenerational influence through the lens of emotional reflexivity, this study highlights the importance of the parental role in socializing children about food, and how intergenerational reflexivity helps inform parental food socialization practices. The intergenerational reflexivity of parents is, thus, deemed to be crucial in the socialization process.

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 identify key motivations for adolescents using and shopping on the internet, and to segment the sample based on these motivations.

This research occurs in two phases: a qualitative phase involving interviews with adolescents aged 12-15 and parents of adolescents in this age group; then, a quantitative phase using a survey (n=360) to measure the motivations and other key profiling variables identified in the qualitative phase and the literature review.

The research identifies five basic motivations and two shopping motivations influencing adolescent online usage and shopping. Next, a cluster analysis is conducted using the motivations developed and is used to identify segments of adolescent internet users and shoppers, which are subsequently described.

The sample of adolescents was taken from a town in the southeast USA. Caution should be taken when generalizing to adolescents outside this region.

This research identifies for internet marketers the different types of adolescent internet users and shoppers. It also recognizes key motivations that marketers should consider when targeting adolescents.

This research is the first to identify important segments of adolescents based on their motivations for online usage and shopping, and builds on a limited stream of research relative to adolescents and internet shopping.