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Paperback
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN13: 9780684870564
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Marketing targeted at kids is virtually everywhere -- in classrooms and textbooks, on the Internet, even at Girl Scout meetings, slumber parties, and the playground. Product placement and other innovations have introduced more subtle advertising to movies and television. Drawing on her own survey research and unprecedented access to the advertising industry, Juliet B. Schor, New York Times bestselling author of The Overworked American, examines how marketing efforts of vast size, scope, and effectiveness have created "commercialized children." Ads and their messages about sex, drugs, and food affect not just what children want to buy, but who they think they are. In this groundbreaking and crucial book, Schor looks at the consequences of the commercialization of childhood and provides guidelines for parents and teachers. What is at stake is the emotional and social well-being of our children.Like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia, and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Born to Buy is a major contribution to our understanding of a contemporary trend and its effects on the culture.
Parents will be tempted to read Born to Buy as a kind of contemporary horror story, with ever more sophisticated marketing wunderkinds as Dr. Frankensteins and their children as the relentless monsters they create. Indeed, it's difficult to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the avariciousness, omnipotence, and ingenuity of the advertising industry Juliet B. Schor portrays when it comes to transforming preschool kids into voracious, 'tude-infused consumers. Intermixing research data with anecdotal illustrations, Schor chronicles the rapid development of a once-shackled industry that now markets R-rated movies to 9-year-olds. The mind boggles at the notion that Seventeen magazine's target readership is now pre-teens. While Schor unearths a surplus of information on the effectiveness of advertising, she's not nearly as adept at proposing effective responses. Reacting to the power and creativity of the consumer culture with politically unfeasible regulation and parental diligence is a little like attacking Frankenstein's creature with torches. Still, Born to Buy is an eye-opening account of an industry that is commercializing childhood with remarkable effectiveness and insouciance. --Steven Stolder
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| We need more studies like this! |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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I was a math teacher for 7 years and I ultimately quit the job never to return. I worked hard and was proud of what I accomplished but increasingly found myself powerless to really affect the lives of my students in a meaningful and helpful way. I became aware of a billion dollar goliath staring down into my face squashing my feeble attempts to educate these youths. I worked 50 to 60 hours a week, 12 hour days sometimes, and even put a minimum annual amount of $500 of my own money into buying necessary instructional materials. Yet, it wasn't enough. I was confused. I didn't understand why so many students had the money to buy expensive brand name jeans that were well over 100 dollars yet could not afford to bring a 10 cent pencil to class. Students had cell phones, designer clothes, and all sorts of goodies and yet were disrespectful to me, challenged my authority, or simply just ignored me. Some students even wondered why they were not paid to go to school.
Obviously, their priorities were not education. And where do these attitudes come from? Why is it that schools struggle to get the money they need having bake sales (or selling their souls to corporations) for school supplies and such? What is it? Politicians love to go on about "No Child Left Behind" and yet rob the poor with lotteries to offset state funds for education just so they can build more prisons, roads, or whatever it takes for them to get re-elected.
The answer is clear. The answer is in this book. Juliet B. Schor does an outstanding job shining the light of truth upon the real evil-doers in the world. And I state whole heartedly that any person who is willing to exploit a child for their own personal gain is indeed an evil-doer. Make no mistake! There is a billion dollar industry that is profiting from failing schools and the degradation of morals. This industry cares not if the child's priorities are Hum-Vee's and Rolex watches. They have no interest if this kid goes to school without a pencil. All they care about is sucking their coveted dollar from whatever kid they can!
I am sick and tired of it. I resent how Madison Avenue treats people. And I am disgusted with their exploitation of our young people. Whoever is engaged in this should be ashamed of themselves (if they even feel shame). I cannot imagine such people as even being human.
This is why I am so thankful for this book. And, this is why this book is so important. We need more books like this! We need more people seeing this sickness and we need more people willing to challenge Madison Avenue's stranglehold over the people.
I tip my hat to Juliet Schor and thank her for this fine work.
If you are interested in learning more about this than this is an outstanding source. I've also read her other books and I highly recommend them as well.
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| Baby we were born to buy... |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Anyone living in the industrialized world these days is born to buy. Today's form of rampant consumerism probably has more people in its grip than either politics or religion combined. For many people today, connections betweenproducts, well-being and self-worth inhabit deep subconscious levels. Some people probably never even acknowledge their fervent emotional ties to "stuff." Such attachments get embedded early and often. They can last a lifetime. Of course, such associations are just the type that advertising aims to exploit. After all, what company doesn't want a near guaranteed lifetime consumer base? Juliet Schor, author of two other books on America's new peculiar institution, finds this intensifying exploitation abominable. The first part of the book's subtitle says it all: "The Commercialized Child." Schor's own work drove her to to this theme. As the introduction explains, Americans have increasingly worked more hours (discussed in Schor's 1992 "The Overworked American") while simultaneously piling on the consumables (discussed in 1998's "The Overspent American"). She realized that most "downshifters" (those who reject the endless hamster wheel of work-and-spend) were not parents. Later she realized one possible explanation: children remain the gateway to the consumer world for most households. They point and scream "I want that!" in ways difficult to ignore. They want stuff. Then they want more stuff. And more stuff. The little id machines just don't seem to stop wanting. Plus, in the world of kids "stuff" often determines status. They want things because others have them or more likely because others don't have them. So they beg until the buy. Putting it another way, 21st century parenting and consuming definitely go hand in hand. As Schor explored this theme, the indelible tendrils between childhood and buying rose from the depths of our culture. "Born to Buy," an almost inevitable follow-up to her earlier work, argues that our current levels and modes of consumption literally harm our children and could even stifle their future well-being. And she doesn't just gripe. The book burgeons with data and examples that support her claims. Her studies take her into some of the murkiest and most disturbing depths of advertising and marketing.
Beginning with chapter two, the book slowly builds to chapter eight's climax, after which it delineates potential solutions for Schor's dilemma. Beginning with a look back, the book describes how childhood consumption has changed over the past few generations. The "gatekeeper model" in which mothers provided the main conduit for their kids' consumption, gave way to the more independent child exposed to marketing. Dependency turned into power. The now infamous "nag" weapon has led to many purchases as children plead until their frustrated parents acquiesce for their own mental health. Such tools arose from new technology. Television provided direct access to childrens' desires. Psychologists and sociologists were called in to help tap these endless gushing wells of want. Kids not only want stuff but also independence from mom and dad. TV delivered as it translated personal values into sales. "Cool" of course still exists, and advertisers were quick to depict their products as "anti-parent." Poor ma and pa became outcasts in this new ocean of cool. Strangely, kids never noticed that the people driving this movement were probably just other kids' parents. But as advertisers watched kids, kids noticed them watching, too. Kids became empowered in the marketplace as consumers. Products spoke to them. Schor sums it up by quoting Nickelodeon's laconic tagline of the time: "kids rule." Kids also became older through what Schor calls "age compression." Adult products such as cigarettes, R-rated movies, alcohol and other forbidden fruit targeted kids (unofficially, of course). They grow up fast, indeed. As marketers realized the potential, they zapped right into kids themselves. "Elite" ethnographic (and anthropological) groups such as the GIA ("Girl's Intelligence Agency") recruited kids to market directly to their friends to create grassroots viral hype. Then buying entered the schools with the very controversial Channel One "newscasts" and commercially skewed textbooks (called SEM or "Sponsored Educational Material"). Then kids became consultants working directly for companies (Levi Strauss started this movement in the 1980s) and then research went directly into childrens' brains with "neuromarketing." The doo doo just gets deeper and deeper. Some consumer "events" have become so abstract that those involved may not even know they're inadvertently taking part in a marketing scheme. Then the social concerns crept in. Does marketing encourage, maybe intentionally, consumption of unhealthy and even dangerous substances like cigarettes and junk food? And does the effect last a lifetime? What's the correlation between junk food commercials and obesity? And are kids actually empowered by advertising, as the industry claims, or are they seduced into buying its wares against their wills, as some critics say? In any case, chapter 8 outlines a study Schor conducted on teens in Massachusetts. This is the most technical and chart-crammed chapter of the book. The conclusion of the 300 person study was fairly slanted towards commercial culture having an unquestionable adverse effect on children. "The more strongly a person subscribes to materialist values, the pooer is his or her quality of life," Schor summarizes. The final chapter explores solutions to the book's dilemma, including sheltering children from media, or government regulation against advertising to kids (though the FTC had its hands tied in 1981). But Schor admits that parents, children and marketers all need to do better to limit the adverse effects of rabid commercialism.
"Born to Buy" appeared in 2004 and its data remains current to 2003. In today's overly dynamic world this sounds like ancient history. Though some of the cultural references are starting to date, the book's underlying themes still ring true. The United States has become insanely materialistic. And the lure of profit often seems to overshadow concern for people (the most insidious example appears in chapter 7, which outlines a 2003 London Times report on food scientists studying the possibilities of exploiting addictive binge eating). This applies to adults as well as to children, but some studies, though controversial, suggest that younger children are especially susceptible to the siren call of advertisers. Most revealing are the quotes from industry insiders themselves. These shocking testimonies pepper the book and show that marketers do sometimes feel moral pangs about their peculiar institution. Some even say that the entire industry is headed in the wrong direction. Schor's eye opening book provides plenty of evidence that we've actually already gone too far.
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| Born To Buy |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
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This book says a lot of the same thing right through it. Quite a boring book.
That is my opinion.
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| Excellent Text! |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Textbook arrived in a timely fashion and was in excellent condition. Would definitely recommend this seller!
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| Essential reading for thoughtful parents |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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The influence of consumerism on my children has been a concern to me for a long time. From the moment I first held my son, I realized that I had a deep responsibility to raise him with strong values and the ability to reason through information presented to him, and I feel exactly the same way about my daughter. To me, modern consumerism is just a bunch of noise attempting to drown out this message, using any number of ploys to convince my children to not make well-reasoned decisions, particularly when it comes to material goods and money.
Born to Buy focuses in on those very issues. It's written by Juliet Schor, who also wrote The Overspent American, a book focusing on adults and consumerism that I reviewed a while back and quite enjoyed.
Much like Schor's earlier book, I found Born to Buy thoroughly well-researched and insightful, but did it really open my eyes to the relationship between consumer behavior and my children? Let's dig into the book and find out.
One quick general comment: this book is fact-packed and well researched. In fact, it's almost overwhelming and I found myself reading it in chunks and on occasion tracking down referenced source materials to find out more. To me, this is a good thing; to others, it may come off like drinking from a fire hose.
Introduction
The book opens with a historical perspective of the history of marketing, going back to the nascent days when children weren't marketed to at all, forward to the period between World War I and World War II where marketing for child-targeted products were pitched at the parents, on to today where most advertising is targeted at children in some way or another.
The Changing World of Children's Consumption
To be honest, I found this chapter depressing. It cites a huge number of studies to show that children are more involved in consumer-oriented decision making than ever before, but that's not led to a good result. Children often tie their own self worth to the material goods around them, to a level far unprecedented compared to previous generations of children. A majority of children in the United States are directly involved in the consumer decisions of the family (things like automobile purchases) and their sense of identity is somewhat based on the outcome of those decisions.
This leads to several things: children today are more likely to have emotional and mental disorders and are much more likely to be out of shape and overweight. The psychology of materialism and materialist values has negative effects on an adult mind, but on the mind of a child who has not yet learned many of the things adults take for granted, the effects of materialism can be tremendous - and feelings of insufficiency that are pervasive in modern marketing lead children to a negative self-image (that, of course, can only be pacified through more consumer goods).
From Tony the Tiger to Slime Time Live: The Content of Commercial Messages
Here, Schor focuses on the variety of themes found in commercial messages and, again, as a parent my stomach felt uncomfortable. Children's advertising focuses on a number of basic techniques: representing adults as repressive and "uncool" (something that can be battled with the latest consumer product), using older children as a sign that an item is "cool" (encouraging children to emulate older children rather than their peers), and various other techniques.
Schor goes into particular detail about Nickelodeon, the child-oriented television network, and why it is extremely effective at creating great marketing targeting children. The entire network encourages those themes - children are somehow more intuitive, intelligent, and "cool" than the adults and emulation of trends from older children (often an echoing of the marketing going on on MTV). These themes are pervasive throughout the programming, so when the ads appear espousing these same themes, the products are seen as much more acceptable and desirable - after all, wouldn't the kid in the television show also enjoy this product?
The Virus Unleashed: Ads Infiltrate Everyday Life
This chapter focuses primarily on detailing the marketing strategy behind a toy called P-O-X, which failed to take off in the marketplace in 2001 mostly due to bad timing connected to 9/11. The marketing methods involved with this toy were quite impressive. Perhaps most impressive was the use of "alpha children" to be marketers for the product - Hasbro actually gave the toy to children who were peer-identified as "cool" and paid them to give even more of them away to their friends.
What's the conclusion from this? Children can no longer trust normal methods of information. Marketers are quite willing to find every avenue imaginable to reach a child, and the methods that parents and children used to be able to rely on for unbiased information have become clouded. Thus, it's more important than ever to actually research a product and get multiple opinions on it than just trust what the "cool kid" says - he may actually be paid to say it.
Captive Audiences: The Commercialization of Public Schools
Marketing also filters heavily into the public school system, from things like Channel One to advertising messages slipped into the classroom content to school administrators directly allowing advertising in schools. School (at least public school) is not a safe haven from marketing - in fact, for many, school is a place where they are exposed to more marketing.
While I am aware that this goes on (I certainly was exposed to it in the mid 1990s in school), what bothers me more than anything is that the reason for most of these programs is inadequate government funding for education. I understand completely why schools have to do things like this - if you want your school to have revenue so they can afford modern textbooks, you may have to sell ad space, because the government certainly isn't stepping up to the plate.
Dissecting the Child Consumer: The New Intrusive Research
Why is marketing so effective? Here, Schor provides some big clues: there's some amazingly thorough research going on behind marketing. Schor relates the use of brain scans, home monitoring, videotaping and quantitative and qualitative analysis of child responses, and numerous other scientific analyses that are used solely to develop better models for convincing children to want products.
It's no wonder that children are so susceptible to marketing. The marketing models developed by these organizations are incredibly well conceived, detailed, and are targeted towards the specific psychological areas where children are weakest. Ads hone in on areas of insecurity, triggering them in whatever way is needed to evoke a positive response toward the product and encourage more sales.
Habit Formation: Selling Kids on Junk Food, Drugs, and Violence
Even more disturbing, many of these techniques mix thoroughly with elements that are simply not good for children, things like drugs, violence, and junk food. Junk food, tobacco, and alcohol advertisements directly target children, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. These ads intend to plant the idea of the product in the minds of the children so they will not only desire the product themselves, but encourage their parents to purchase it.
Even violence is marketed, through games like Grand Theft Auto and violent films. Even though I have no problem with these products existing, I am bothered by the fact that many of them are marketed directly towards children. I have no reason to believe my children will not make sound moral choices in their lives, but that also doesn't mean that an eight year old child should enjoy shooting realistic depictions of people as a pastime.
How Consumer Culture Undermines Children's Well-Being
What does all of this culminate with? Since many forms of media are designed by marketers to have psychological hooks into the minds of children, many children wind up addicted to media, addicted to consumerism, and prone to emulating the behavior that they see. Schor goes through a mountain of data outlining this, and the results aren't pretty.
Exposure to consumer culture is directly related to a greater tendencies to lie, to cheat, to steal, to be overweight, to reject parental authority and guidance, to be violent, and to exhibit signs of greediness. Why? All of these psychological hooks within marketing push children down this avenue. They come to believe that they need the products, and they're shown that antisocial behaviors are often the best way to get them.
Empowered or Seduced? The Debate About Advertising and Marketing to Kids
Who's to blame for the pervasiveness of marketing? The obvious answer is to point the finger at the marketers, but that's not exactly the entire picture, either.
In many cases, parents are to blame in that they allow media to become a surrogate parent. When you find it "easier" to plop your child in front of a television for a few hours so you can do something else, it's not a healthy situation. Similarly, when you can't (or don't) rationally discuss consumer purchases with your child, that creates problems as well, and when you exhibit consumer-oriented behavior (lusting after items), you teach your child that such behavior is good.
Society as a whole is somewhat to blame as well. We've de-focused from adequate education funding, requiring schools to allow marketers in to be able to afford good educational materials.
Decommercializing Childhood: Beyond Big Bird, Bratz Dools, and the Back Street Boys
So how can one opt out of this trap. Schor offers a lot of guidance in this closing chapter, so I tried to boil it down to several points that can be taken away.
First, parents need to create rules about television and stick to them. Limit the amount of time your child can watch television each day. In fact, at our house, we're getting very close to abandoning the television altogether, leaving just a DVD player to watch films and programs without commercials and a game console (the sole thing keeping us from this is the difficulty in watching live events).
Second, parents should walk the walk as well. If you restrict the television your children watch, you should restrict the amount you watch as well.
Third, parents should limit their child's exposure to junk foods. Learn how to cook at home and avoid the garbage. A piece of candy once in a while is fine, but Mickey D's every other day is a very bad thing.
Fourth, parents should discuss these issues with the parents of their child's friends. Let them know that you don't want your children watching a ton of television if you feel strongly about it. Perhaps you can find parents who feel much the same way as you do.
Finally, and this is the most important thing you can possibly do, spend more time with your kids away from media. Participate in sports with them. Read with them. Play board games with them. Talk to them. Do projects with them. Anything that you can do with your child in a non-marketed situation is a good thing and it will reap great benefits for you and your child.
Buy or Don't Buy?
If you have children and can tolerate reading that is a bit dry in a few places, Born to Buy is a must-read. It demonstrates in a clear, fact-based manner the diversity of ways that advertisements and consumer behavior influences your child in profound ways, for better and for worse, and it provides a lot of great advice for parents concerned about these issues.
The book was quite dense, but it was incredibly thought provoking for me as a parent and as a consumer. I'll admit that since I've read this book, I have witnessed many of the things discussed in the book - and they deeply bother me. In fact, this book made me inch ever closer to a completely television-free home.
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