Editorial

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Young Consumers, Volume 12, Issue 2

Welcome to the second issue of 2011. An international set of papers drawn from the USA, the UK, France, Egypt, India, Sri Lanka and Australia are presented here for you. I have tried to group them in some way, but our field is getting so large and the scope is so wide this is not completely possible given the range of topics in this issue.

Let’s start with Shaun Powell from Australia and his colleagues in Scotland who have made a valuable contribution to the literature on food preference and choice in families. Using qualitative methods, they suggest that younger children from three to eight years of age apply effective if less sophisticated pestering techniques than older children, and play a significant role in determining family food consumption. They show children in purposeful and directed pursuit of food brands and products, along with an awareness of the purpose of promotion and a desire to use a number of persuasive techniques in their dealings with parents. Coralie Damay and her colleagues in France have also explored food consumption in children using qualitative techniques, and their site was the school cafeteria and the various rules and social interactions that were operative there. This valuable study sheds further light on one of our most prolific research areas in the field – children and food consumption in the content of consumer socialisation.

There are two papers on fashion and youth in emerging economies. One by Chamil Rathnayake investigated fashion consciousness in Sri Lanka by surveying young people under 25, and he describes three dimensions obtained by factor analysis that underlie his data. The dynamic between Western and traditional modes is well illustrated in this context. Ritu Narang investigated young people in India, and she was primarily interested in store choice for clothes. She identified different psychographic clusters of young consumers in her extensive survey. Both these papers provide valuable consumer insights into youth consumption in these Asian markets.

Emily Kinsky’s paper with her colleague Shannon Bichard is a qualitative study in the USA of young children’s brand recognition, in which they demonstrate that these young consumers are quite capable of recognising familiar logos and the products associated with them although they may not know the brand name. This important contribution to the growing body of literature on preschoolers and brands is essential reading and provides a valuable contribution to the debate on brand logo presence in our children’s environments.

Noha El-Bassiouny and his colleagues in Egypt report on a novel empirical study that looks at Egypt as an example of a growing consumer market. This piece of research illustrates the relevance of character education programs for inducing changes in consumption patterns and is based on an earlier conference paper in England.

Varsha Jain and her colleagues in an Indian study were interested in whether human or character (i.e. fictional) celebrity endorsers worked best for different product categories in Indian young consumers by measuring their attitudes toward the product under different experimental conditions. Results are not simple and there are insights given here that would help marketers to youth in this growing market place.

Finally we have out regular column brought to you by GALA, the Global Advertising Lawyers Alliance, where regulations and codes of practice across the world are described. This quarter we look at Argentina.

I hope you enjoy reading all of these valuable papers and many thanks to all our reviewers and contributors without whom these regular issues would not be possible.

Dr Brian YoungEditor