Editorial

Children are increasingly recognised as an important marketfor everything from toys, through video games to breakfastcereals. When it comes to food, we know relatively littleabout their consumption experiences or indeed how they, asopposed to their parents, respond to the various attempts offood companies to engage with them in the commercialmarketplace. Discussions around food marketing haveelicited accusations that include unfairly promoting un-healthy food products to children, using devious marketingtactics to lure the unwary, and innovative techniques toengage children with promotions, cinema and televisiontie‐ins, character licensing and a variety of techniques toencourage children to buy certain types of food or to pestertheir parents into obliging. Childhood and food are indeed atthe core of contemporary societal anxieties that emphasizethe complex intertwining of risk, pleasure and control thatchildren, and parents, have to deal with in their foodconsumption practices.

This Special Issue of the Journal of Consumer Behaviouris an attempt to answer some of the questions aroundchildren as food consumers and to give an indication of thetypes of research that are being conducted in this area. Ouraim is to represent innovative approaches to children asconsumers that affirms or challenges these assumptions wehave about young consumers and how they engage withfood as part of their own experiences as opposed to those oftheir parents or adults. What, in other words, do the childrenactually make of all this food marketing as well aseducational and health messages directed towards them asindividuals who buy food and consume food bought andprepared by others? As interest in young consumers and thechildren’s market grows, it is imperative that we begin tolook at children as active consumers dealing with complexissues and normative systems rather than as simply recipientsof food or as vulnerable consumers in need of protection. Aswe see a shift towards ‘feeding the children’, this reiteratesthe need to consider children as part of family food decisions(Cook, 2009).

The call for papers attracted a number of submissions,although surprisingly few on new media, and we would liketo thank all those who took the time to submit a manuscriptas well as the reviewers who actively engaged in aconstructive scientific dialogue with the authors. A numberof these were very good papers, but in this Special Issue, wewere looking for new and innovative approaches to howchildren engage with food marketing in their capacity asyoung consumers. Several papers had good research designand execution but the focus on the child or food, ormarketing was tangential to the research. Others wereheavily oriented towards interesting empirical findings butfailed to contextualise this empirical work within a moretheoretical or critical framework that met the demands of theJournal of Consumer Behaviour. Indeed, the call for papers

revealed both the huge variety and scope of work in the field.The varieties of epistemology, method and researchtechniques betray a very divergent set of approaches toconducting research with children, each with their ownparticular assumptions, benefits and drawbacks. Further-more, it revealed the specific challenges of trying to conductresearch with young consumers and interpret their answers.This is not an ‘easy’ field in which to design researchprojects as it requires the implementation of a set of basicprecautions such as, from a cognitive standpoint, ensuringthat children actually understand the question they are askedand master the answer format that they are offered(questionnaire, Likert scale, pictures, choice, etc.). Othercontextual factors have also to be considered, as animportant part of empirical research on children. Consump-tion is conducted within schools, institutions in whichchildren enact their social role of pupils, leading them toendeavour—as honestly as they can—to provide a ‘correct’answer rather than merely accounting for their actualconsumption practices or food preferences. Through amirroring effect, interviewing children within a peer groupor within a focus group leads to a similar difficulty aschildren enact themselves—quite sincerely—as belonging toa cultural system that is socially constructed in opposition toadults’ cultural references and normative requirements.Trying to escape the divide between adults’ culture andchildren’s peer culture, or the divide between the savvy adultconsumer and the inexperienced and vulnerable child,should encourage us to design innovative research methods,allowing a consideration of the set of meaningful relation-ships through which the child develops its knowledge ofcommercial environments and learns to behave in anappropriate manner and improve its decisions‐makingcapacity, but from his or her own point of view and notonly from the adult one.

We have tried to capture some of that diversity in thepapers we selected for this Special Issue. These papersrepresent a range of different approaches from traditionalexperimental design studies that adopt a positivistmethodology to more interpretive pieces that engagedirectly in the experiences and worlds of the child.Children from different European and North Americancultures are represented, which is not to claim any cross‐cultural comparison but rather to reflect that research onchildren as consumers is not confined to any geographicalboundaries.

We have several papers in this Special Issue thatprovide fresh insights into the difference betweenchildren’s food and adult food, consider the way in whichchildren engage with food labelling and nutritionalmessages, look at the complex areas of family foodnegotiation, and examine how children engage with newmedia, but in a way that might encourage more healthful

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Journal of Consumer Behaviour, J. Consumer Behav. 10: 119–121 (2011)Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/cb.363

behaviour. As we stated at the outset, marketing often getsbad press, part perhaps of what Kline (2011) calls the newmedia risks around food, but these papers provide someinsights not only into the way in which children interpretand relate to some of these practices but also into theways in which some of these marketing techniques can beused to encourage more healthy eating. Having said this, itis also something of a concern about the extent to whichhealth has become a key component of this discourse, andthis is reflected in the number of papers that chose tofeature health as a key part of children’s food experience.For some, childhood is a time of carefree abundance andfun. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of fun with health, ofadult with child or marketing with parental responsibilityraises broader issues around the ways in which socialscientists construct and consider children as consumersexposed to the market or, even more broadly, investigatehow children develop in a mass consumption society inwhich they are ineluctably immersed.

We begin with a paper by Elliot that looks at children’sunderstanding and categorisation of food. In this paper, shehighlights some of the assumptions around what, from thechild’s perspective, constitutes ‘children’s food’ and aptlycaptures the ways in which children construct their own foodworlds relative to those of adults. What she illustrates is theneed to consider how children understand food and the way inwhich marketing contributes to the association of foodwith funand in the process (re)constructs that discourse. Elliot under-lines that fun foods are often associated with ‘junk food’ andeating practices regarded as spoiled, unhealthy and uncon-trolled. She alludes at the end of the paper to the fact that bothchildren and adults have their own ideas about both normativeand transgressive eating and drinking. Thus, the ambivalenceof what children consider as food aimed at them offers anextremely interesting base fromwhich to examine and questionsome ambiguities that characterise the contemporary socialconstruction of childhood.

The paper by Miller et al. is concerned with the ways inwhich children engage with and understand food labels, but,unlike the Elliot paper, it adopts a very different approachchoosing to use a more traditional laboratory‐based studyand experimental design. Although there are interestingissues around the extent to which this is representative ofchildren’s experience within the cereal category, theyprovide a clear indication of the ways in which, ceterisparibus, nutritional labelling and claims influence children’sliking and preferences for breakfast cereals, one of the mostheavily promoted food products. Their findings haveinteresting implications for the role of nutritional labellingin the promotion of more healthful consumption and inhighlighting the different reactions of children and theirparents. This raises important questions about the need tounderstand how meaning is socially (re)constructed when wechoose to elicit the views of children themselves. Moreover,it has important policy implications for those engaged inpromoting healthy eating who seek to understand informa-tion and communication mechanisms that could give parentsand children an opportunity to have a clear opinion onhealthy eating behaviours.

The third paper, by Pires and Agante, also positivist inits approach, picks up on this issue of packaging but in aninnovative way that is reflexive of the need to try to utilisemethods and stimuli that are representative of the sorts ofmarketing that children are exposed to. In this research,they design a three‐step methodology aimed at testingchildren’s reaction to a packaging design for healthyproducts using the communication codes that are normallyassociated with the promotion of ‘fun’ foods. They discussthe process by which they develop and test this packagingconcept, and in doing so, they begin to challenge thedepth of conflict that appears to exist in the oppositionbetween fun and health. Like the first two papers, thisraises some interesting issues around the categorisation offoods and marketing to children, particularly in regard tothe promotion of healthy eating and the possible role formarketing and brand messages to overcome this structuraldivide between healthy and fun.

Dias and Agante offer us an insight into the ways inwhich a new emerging marketing technique, advergames,might be used to promote healthy food. But the realcontribution of the paper lies in what it shows us about thediscourse around food and health and the ways in whichmarketing is contributing to this debate. In an interestingresearch design, they use video games to look at the waysin which children’s ideas about food are framed in relationto the fun experienced by being immersed in a video gamewith its own rules and challenges. Although normally usedto promote less healthful foods, they illustrate how theassociation of more healthful foods with fun through theuse of an advergame has an impact on children’s liking andfood preferences. Although the paper considers only theshort‐term impact, it would be interesting to consider howsuch techniques might be used over the longer term inpromoting healthful behaviour and break some of themonopoly that certain foods and brands have built on ‘fun’to directly target children.

The final paper by Nørgaard and Brunsø represents aslight deviation for the Special Issue but addresses animportant aspect of children in relation to food. In thispaper, the authors examine the ways in which childrenengage in debates around food within the family. Buildingon earlier work, they provide an interesting account ofcontextual influences on children’s consumption practiceand force us to consider the role of marketing relative toother social and cultural influences on children’s eatingpractices. This paper opens up the broader question aboutthe role of marketing in shaping children’s consumption andits contribution to their understanding and construction ofassociated meaning. Even though it draws on specificinvestigation techniques inspired from ethnography andrequires a special expertise from the researcher, the authorsdemonstrate that investigating family negotiations aboutfood constitutes a potentially rich perspective for analysingtweens as well as children’s agency and reflexivity abouttheir own eating practices.

Although marketing is clearly influencing the way inwhich children understand food, looking at this interactionoutside of the social and cultural context fails to account

120 D. Marshall and V. I. de la Ville

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Consumer Behav. 10: 119–121 (2011)

DOI: 10.1002/cb

for the scope and the complexity of children’s foodconsumption practices. As Cook (2009) notes, children arepart of and have been part of a commercial environment,they are exposed to food products and brands on a dailybasis. Our challenge as researchers requires us to try andunderstand how children respond to and also contribute tofamily food culture. Looking at food consumption allowsus to question the actual scope of children’s ‘agency’ andthe institutionalization of contemporary forms of familydemocracy. These papers hopefully help us to see some ofthat complexity and the inherent challenges in trying tomake sense of children’s food culture especially inrelation to the marketing techniques and activities thatcontribute to the evolving meanings associated with thatexperience.

REFERENCES

Cook D. 2009. Semantic provisioning of children’s food: commerce,care and maternal practice. Childhood 16(3): 317–334.

Kline S. 2011. Globesity, Food Marketing and family Lifestyles.Palgrave MacMillan: Basingstoke.

DAVID MARSHALL1

VALERIE INÉS DE LA VILLE2

1The University of Edinburgh, Management School and Economics,

50 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JY, UK2Centre Européen des Produits de l’Enfant Institut d’Administration

des Entreprises de l’Université de Poitiers Laboratory,

CEREGE EA 1722186, route de Bordeaux,

16000 Angoulême, France

Editorial 121

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Consumer Behav. 10: 119–121 (2011)

DOI: 10.1002/cb