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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
According to consumerism and economics expert Schor (The Overspent American), the average 10-year-old has memorized about 400 brands, the average kindergartner can identify some 300 logos and from as early as age two kids are "bonded to brands." Some may call it brainwashing, others say it's genius; regardless of how you see it, the approach is the same: target young kids directly and consistently, appeal to them and not the adults in their lives and get your product name in their heads from as early an age as possible. From TV shows and toys to video games, snacks and clothing, kids today, according to Schor, know too much yet understand too little, sopping up subliminal and not-so-subliminal messages of "buy, buy, buy." Drawing on a significant body of research, including interviews with everyone from advertising executives to the kids themselves, Schor exposes what she believes to be a huge cesspool of materialism, consumerism and commercialization that could be, and perhaps already is, leading to a generation of kids with no concept of what is important and truly necessary in life. By offering up her own ideas of what can be done by parents, educators, advertisers and others to lessen these problems, Schor goes beyond uncovering the problem and into the realm of concrete solutions.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
"Born to Buy is so grounded in appalling data about both kids and advertising companies, it has the effect of making even the most TV-and-advertising-wary parents among us realize that we haven't been half vigilant enough."
-- Amy Bloom, O, The Oprah Magazine
"An artfully argued, important expose."
-- BusinessWeek
"A wake-up call."
-- Los Angeles Times
Product Description
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.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter one: Introduction
The United States is the most consumer-oriented society in the world. People work longer hours than in any other industrialized country. Savings rates are lower. Consumer credit has exploded, and roughly a million and a half households declare bankruptcy every year. There are more than 46,000 shopping centers in the country, a nearly two-thirds increase since 1986. Despite fewer people per household, the size of houses continues to expand rapidly, with new construction featuring walk-in closets and three- and four-car garages to store record quantities of stuff. According to my estimates, the average adult acquires forty-eight new pieces of apparel a year. (She has also been discarding clothes at record rates, in comparison to historical precedents.) Americans own more television sets than inhabitants of any other country -- nearly one set per person. Observers blame TV for plummeting levels of civic engagement, the dearth of community, and the decline of everyday socializing. Heavy viewing has also resulted in historically unprecedented exposure to commercials. And ads have proliferated far beyond the television screen to virtually every social institution and type of public space, from museums and zoos, to college campuses and elementary school classrooms, restaurant bathrooms and menus, at the airport, even in the sky.
The architects of this culture -- the companies that make, market, and advertise consumer products -- have now set their sights on children. Although children have long participated in the consumer marketplace, until recently they were bit players, purchasers of cheap goods. They attracted little of the industry's talent and resources and were approached primarily through their mothers. That has changed. Kids and teens are now the epicenter of American consumer culture. They command the attention, creativity, and dollars of advertisers. Their tastes drive market trends. Their opinions shape brand strategies. Yet few adults recognize the magnitude of this shift and its consequences for the futures of our children and of our culture.
I have been studying consumer issues for twenty years. An economist by training and inclination, I became interested in commercialization through studying the culture of work. My first book, The Overworked American, reported my findings of an unrecognized and unexpected rise in working hours. The average employee now spends 200 more hours per year on the job, or five extra weeks of work, than he or she did thirty years ago. Fifty years ago, American work hours were substantially lower than those in Western Europe; they now exceed them by more than 300 a year (or about eight weeks). Even Japan, the world's workaholic when I began my research in the early 1980s, now has shorter annual hours of work than the United States.
My earlier book's analysis of why hours were increasing pointed to workplace factors such as employers' cost structures and the persistence of corporate cultures of face time and long hours. I found that employers were unwilling to allow workers to trade income for time, and that for the past half-century, most people got higher incomes but also had to work longer hours. What I did not understand was why so few employees had chosen to resist these schedules. Polling data showed that most people were satisfied with their balance of work time and pay, despite rising hours. Although eventually dissatisfaction grew, the extent of acquiescence to long schedules remained puzzling.
So I began to investigate consumer behavior, where I found an answer. Americans had gotten caught in what I called the cycle of work-and-spend, in which the compensation for longer hours was a rising material standard of living. People were accumulating stuff at an unprecedented rate. Demanding jobs and escalating debt in turn resulted in high levels of stress and enormous pressure on family life. Some tried to buy their way out of the time squeeze by contracting out more household services, jetting off for stress-busting vacations, or finding a massage therapist, strategies that themselves require greater and greater household income. Through the boom years of the nineties, as new wealth led to a dramatic upscaling of consumer norms, the pressures intensified. Luxury replaced comfort as the national aspiration, despite its affordability for only a fraction of the population. In my second book, The Overspent American, I catalogued these changes and identified the social trends driving them. Americans had come under strong imperatives to keep up with the escalating costs of basics, like health care and education, as well as luxuries, such as branded goods, bigger vehicles, and outlays for leisure and recreation. A trip to Disneyworld became an expensive, but urgent, social norm. Households spent more, saved less, and took on more debt. Meanwhile, commercialization proceeded apace as branding became ever more sophisticated, ads proliferated, and shopping turned into a 24/7 affair. The country was preoccupied with getting and spending.
As I was writing The Overspent American in the mid-1990s, I was aware of the pressures parents felt to provide for their children, with requisites ranging from extracurricular activities, to quality education, to fancy athletic footwear. I knew how anxious people were feeling about their kids' futures in a highly competitive global economy. I wrote a bit about these issues. But I conceptualized the consumer market in terms of its orientation to adults, as I watched SUVs replace cars, McMansions replace homes, and designer labels proliferate for everything from sunglasses to jockey shorts. I also studied downshifters -- the millions of Americans who were rejecting the work-and-spend lifestyle, opting instead to work less, spend less, and live more simply. As it turned out, they provided a powerful clue to the growing importance of children in consumer culture.
One part of my research for the spending book was interviews with people toward the far end of the downshifting spectrum -- those who were intentionally rejecting the consumer lifestyle rather than merely working less. I discovered that downshifters who were raising children were almost impossible to find. At the time, I reasoned that children are expensive or that most parents would not want to impose a regime of reduced consumption on their kids.
Eventually I realized that this dearth of downshifting among parents revealed a significant trend in consumer culture. Children have become conduits from the consumer marketplace into the household, the link between advertisers and the family purse. Young people are repositories of consumer knowledge and awareness. They are the first adopters and avid users of many of the new technologies. They are the household members with the most passionate consumer desires, and are most closely tethered to products, brands, and the latest trends. Children's social worlds are increasingly constructed around consuming, as brands and products have come to determine who is "in" or "out," who is hot or not, who deserves to have friends, or social status. In such a world, how many parents opt to downshift or simplify? It's a radical step many children don't welcome.
By the end of the 1990s, I began to take notice of the central role of children in consumer culture, not only as a social scientist, but also as a parent. Our first child, Krishna, had been born in 1991, so I was already encountering commercialized childhood personally. The standard rituals of preparing for a baby centered on consumer choices. Which brand of stroller and car seat? What licensed characters for decorating the baby's room? Is a video camera really necessary? Although we were committed to moderation in our material lives, it was hard as middle-class Americans to avoid many of the features of the work-and-spend lifestyle. I'll never forget our first weekend trip after Krishna was born. As we gathered our gear to pack up the car, my husband, who is from India, stared in disbelief. "There's more stuff in this pile than the average Indian family owns in a lifetime," he observed. What's more, by today's standards, that pile would be considered meager. In the past decade, product innovation and the expansion of "must-have" goods in the infant and toddler category has been nothing short of extraordinary. But as I learned, an excess of baby gear is the least intrusive of the challenges of commercialized childhood. Controlling consumption becomes far more difficult as children reach the preschool years and turn into consumers in their own right.
Our daughter, Sulakshana, was born in 1995. She afforded us firsthand experience of how deeply and pervasively commercialized childhood is gendered. With boys, parents worry about violent products and obsessions with video games. With girls, it's sexualized products and distorted body image. As our children grew, I watched the experience of childhood changing. Kids were coming under increasing pressures to succeed, as homework assignments became longer and performance expectations rose. Overscheduling became a norm in middle-class communities. Many children were growing materialistic, even spoiled. Television, video game, and computer time appeared to be rising, and in many communities, including ours, the streets were empty after school. One Saturday morning after a rare snowstorm, I was struck by the pristine snow and the pervasive quiet: all the kids were inside. I felt sad about their lack of autonomy and lost connection to the outdoors. I became determined to reclaim some of that for my kids and to protect them from the commercial influences I was uneasy about.
As I struggled with these issues as a parent, I also became intellectually captivated by them. I began to think that the most important change in consumer culture was not what the analysts were focusing on -- Internet shopping, branding, consumer credit, or customization of products. It was that the imperative to target kids was remaking the marketplace. By 2003, Martin Lindstrom, one of the world's leading branding gurus, opined that 80...
