Critical Review of Children Consumer Protection National Policies

Abstract

The paper aims to investigate in detail the strategies and efforts of children consumer protection national policies in order to conduct a comprehensive review of ongoing practices. Through content analysis, the paper investigates four dimensions of national policies: general elements of children consumer protection policies, marketing communication restrictions, harmful product-specific restrictions, and empowerment and education in five different countries of diverse cultural dimensions: Germany, the USA, the UK, Spain, and Croatia. The paper fills an existing research gap by emphasizing practices of children consumer protection strategies that should be encouraged and those that should be avoided, thereby formulating the recommendations needed to prevent the negative consequences of marketing communication. The findings confirm that successful strategies have strong national legislations, market self-regulation, and education on media literacy. Advertisement for all potentially harmful product categories should be strictly regulated in order for children to be fully protected. According to the results, Germany and the UK are the most efficient in children consumer protection policies, followed by Spain, Croatia, and the USA.