Children and their brands: how young consumers relate to brands

Introduction

"They are tomorrow's consumers, so start talking with them now, build that relationship when they're younger, and you've got them as an adult" (Lucy Hughes, Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood ).

Children worldwide have become an important and unique market segment for practically every product category, from toys and clothing to cell phones, computers and even financial services. In recent years, there have been many important changes in children's family composition: women started to work outside the home and families became smaller, which increased the importance attributed to each child (Fiates et al. , 2008). This may be a reason for the involvement of children in consumption decisions (Foxman et al. , 1989).

Consumers develop relationships with brands throughout their lives (Fournier, 1998), consuming countless branded products. Importantly, some of these relationships are developed at an early age, when the consumers were children (Ji, 2002). However, research on the brand relationship phenomenon in children is scarce. The main purpose of this study is to clarify the process by which children form relationships with brands. Specifically, we attempt to understand how children as consumers conceptualize brands; we also investigate why and how children engage in positive or negative brand relationships; identify the reasons why young consumers decide to breakup with brands; and examine how brand relationship reconciliation can take place.

Consumers relate to brands

In recent decades, a growing body of knowledge has developed within brand-consumer relationship theory (for a recent review of this line of literature, see Macinnis and Folkes, 2017). As relationships with brands have been an important part of consumer development, we can find research focusing on it. One of the first empirical studies conducted in this domain is the seminal work of Susan Fournier (1998), in which she offers empirical evidence from three adult women about the existence of consumer-brand bonds. In her work, Fournier presents a typology with 15 different types of relationships a consumer can have with a brand. Almost 20 years have passed since Fournier's work, and research has expanded in many different topics such as brands as relationship partners, brand relationship types, brand attachment, aversion to betrayal and brand relationship norms (Macinnis and Folkes, 2017). The present research project builds upon this body of literature and...