Now advertisers target CHILDREN?

From childhood brands have impacted our lives. As a child we were part of fan clubs, we followed our role models who were mostly the brand ambassadors of a particular product. Our buying habits were very much controlled by what these icons said or performed in advertising campaigns. Also the advertisers promote fan clubs and loyalty programs wherein children get a chance to meet their idols, this increases the brand recall and in turn forces the child to buy a particular product.

Often, the products like McDonalds meals, Lays, Maggi Noodles, etc accompany with freebies for children. Mostly children buy these products for the freebies. The children freebie advertisements appear on children TV channels informing how they can play with the free products. These freebies often have an emotional relation with the cartoon the child loves to watch. Below I have tried to list some examples of brands which had impact on children’s buying trends, have also compared those products with what they could have brought incase they hadn’t seen those advertisements.

• Maggi noodles instead of normal hakka noodles
• Lays instead of potato chips
• Pokemon instead of any other cartoon characters
• Coco Cola cold drink instead of lemon squash/coconut water
• iPhone instead of any other phone
• Gaming plaza instead of a game of hide-n-seek, cricket, etc.

Brands have created impacted on the minds of young children to such an extent that they now also tell their parents what to buy and what not to buy, which Brand is good and which is bad, how to use a particular product. The main reason for this can be attributed that children spend more time in front of television (6 hrs per day says a survey done in USA). Actually this is the main reason why most of the advertisers target their ads towards children, try to influence and become no1 brand in children’s minds.

But sometimes I wonder how many Indian Brands have been able to understand this opportunity and change the concept of their Brand? HARDLY ANY Brand Hits my mind when I think about it...