Abstract
Children constitute an important demographic for marketers. Driven by their insatiable hunger for profits, marketers are recklessly and relentlessly targeting the children with their actions and promotions. However, there are growing concerns and widespread criticisms associated with marketing to children. With the arguments for and against marketing to children polarized to extremes, the assessment of moral strengths of these arguments would be of great importance and consequence. John Rawls, in his monumental book, Theory of justice, has provided us with a framework for examining and adjudicating the rightness or wrongness of an action in a fair and unbiased way. In this study, an attempt is made to examine the ethics of marketing to children from a Rawlsian perspective. From Rawls ‘original position’, behind the ‘veil of ignorance’, many criticisms associated with marketing to children stand their ground, making it next to impossible to grant blanket approval for actions of marketers targeting children. The instances of the use of force, coercion, and deception by marketers violate the Rawlsian ideas of justice. Further, the actions of marketers also contradict the principles of justice derived from the original position. From a Rawlsian perspective, marketing to children is anything but just.
Highlights
How do these predictions fare when tested against findings from the literature on children and advertising? the answer is not straightforward
We argue that theory and research on cognitive development can make an important contribution to our understanding of children’s ability to negotiate their way through the world of advertising
We argue that (1) recognition of the intent to sell should emerge soon after children recognize the role of desires in human action and interaction, (2) recognition of persuasive intent relies on an appreciation of second-order mental states, and (3) recognition of bias and promotional intent is unlikely before children acquire a genuinely constructivist theory of mind
Summary
It would be convenient if there were a single, widely accepted theoretical framework in developmental psychology from which to generate straightforward answers to. During the concrete operational period (approximately 7–11 years of age), Piaget argued that children’s thinking becomes more systematic At this stage, they become capable of mentally representing the world and of mentally transforming such representations in well-reasoned ways. Information-processing approaches acknowledge the importance of domain-specific knowledge but argue that domain-general changes in working memory, processing speed, or other all-purpose mechanisms constrain children’s development in these domains (Case 1998; Halford 1999; Pascual-Leone and Johnson 1999) These approaches attempt to chart how such mechanisms develop over time, to assess the specific computational requirements of tasks designed to assess particular abilities, and to predict or explain patterns of performance on these tasks on the basis of what is known about the development of all-purpose mechanisms. Our review is necessarily selective, focusing on the developments that have relevance in assessing what children might understand about advertising
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