The Influencing Role of the Child in Family Decision Making

Author(s): Lewis A. Berey and Richard W. Pollay

Source: Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Feb., 1968), pp. 70-72
Published by: American Marketing Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3149796
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 LEWIS A. BEREY and RICHARD W. POLLAY*

The role of the child as an influencer of consumer decisions was investigated by

studying the interaction between mother and child. Purchase behavior by the
mother of a child's preferred packaged cereals was related to the child's as-
sertiveness and the mother's child-centeredness.

The Influencing Role of the Child in Family

Decision Making

There are at least three main reasons why attentionlated to the amount of input initiated at the child's end
to the role of the child in the market is warranted: (1)of this communication channel. The receiving end of the
the size of the child market is rapidly growing,' (2) communications channel is the parent and the extent of
obviously children influence the family's decision mak-influence a child may have obviously depends on how
ing, and (3) adult consumer behavior is the direct ante-well the parent is "tuned in" to the child.
cedent of child consumer behavior. McNeal [3] discusses This study focused on a product class, ready-to-eat
the behavior of children as direct consumers of certain breakfast cereals in which the mother-child relationship
low priced, low importance (to the family) products, seemed predominant, thus reducing the potential com-
when the child spends money on what he wants. Wells plexity of the influence and purchase process down to a
[6] discusses children's responses to different kinds simple dyad that could be effectively studied. Assuming
of television programming and advertising appeals; both that a successful influence attempt would increase the
Wells and LoSciuto [5] and Garnatz [2] have studied purchase probability of a child's favorite brand, the hy-
the patterns of child behavior and influence within the potheses are:
store setting.
1. The more assertive the child, the more likely the
These last two studies begin to approach the broader,
mother will purchase the child's favorite brands of
more interesting, and more important question of how breakfast cereal.
the child influences family purchasing decisions, but 2. The more child-centered the mother, the more likely
they look at the parent-child interaction within the store she will purchase the child's favorite brands of
-only a small sampling of the total influencing process. breakfast cereal.
It seems advantageous to also measure some more per-
vasive behavioral characteristics of the parent, the child, RESEARCH METHODOLOGY2
and their interaction.
Most products are not directly available to the young Field Operations
child and must be obtained through an intermediary The sample consisted of 48 students from an u
purchasing agent, the parent. The extent of the influence private school system, their mothers, and their teac
a child may have on the parent's purchase decision seems The students were from middle to upper-middle inc
dependent on at least two primary factors, the child's families and were eight to eleven years old.3 A quest
assertiveness and the parent's child-centeredness. Ex- naire was given to three classes of children at t
amination of the flow of influence from the child to the
school; the children recorded their responses
parent shows that the child's assertiveness is clearly re- standard answer sheet. To control for possible i
* Lewis A. Berey is marketing research assistant, General 1 See McNeal [3] for estimates of this trend's strength.
Mills, Inc. Richard W. Pollay is assistant professor of 2 business
Details on methodology and results are in [1].
administration, University of Kansas. The research was done [3] reported patterns of child consumer behavior
' McNeal's
when Berey was a student at the University of Kansas. suggestThe
thatau-
at age nine the child's tastes for goods begin to go
thors are indebted to Glenn Johnson and R. Fred Frevert for beyond his independent economic means. At this age, then, we
their critique of the results and especially to Merlin Spencer for
would expect to see initiation of a continuing influence on the
his suggestions during most phases of the project. family's decision making.
70

Journal of Marketing Research,

Vol. V (February 1968), 70-2

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 INFLUENCING ROLE OF THE CHILD IN FAMILY DECISION MAKING 71

child influence in the group situation,For

the children
the brand were
name recall index the mother was given
asked to spell words as best they fivecould
points forand to she
each brand raise
recalled that the child had
their hands if they did not understand
previously apreferred.
question.4 In-
formation was obtained on each child's age,
The purchase three
index fa-
was constructed giving five, four,
vorite cereals, and his other preferred cereals,
three, or two points to ainventory showed, re-
if the pantry
maximum of ten. spectively, the first, second, or third choices or other
Three teachers of the children rated, on a three-point preferred brands. Assuming the greater a child's in-
scale, the verbalness, leadership, persistence, and ini- fluence, the smaller the probability of the cereal not
tiative of each child relative to his classmates. Children
being in stock, the mother was given one less point than
were rated separately to minimize inter-attribute bias or listed above if she reported recent purchase of a pre-
halo effect. The third phase of the field research con- ferred cereal but was currently out of stock.
sisted of a personal interview with each child's mother in
her home within three days after the child's interview.5
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
When the child was at home during the interview, the
mother was instructed to respond without consulting the The mother's purchase behavior was independent
child. Each mother was first asked to name her child's
these control variables: (a) the child's age, (b) the n
preferred cereal brands. Her inventory of cereals was ber of other children in the home, (c) the mother's o
checked, and she was asked whether she was out of any side employment, (d) the number of trips to the
particular cereals bought within the past two weeks. In-
the child made alone, and (e) the number of trips to t
formation was obtained on the mother's involvement in
store the child accompanied his mother.7
the child's activities, the number of children living at Although the association between child-centered
home, and the number of trips monthly that her childand purchase is significant at the .05 level, the direct
made to the supermarket alone and with her, and theof the Spearman rank correlation (r, = -.27) is op
mother's employment, if any. site to that previously hypothesized. Instead of hi
Index Construction child-centered mothers showing a greater tendenc
purchase their children's favorite cereals, they h
Indexes for these variables were constructed: (a) the
tendency to purchase these cereals less frequently
child's assertiveness, (b) the mother's child-centeredness,
explanation could be that the mother who is more chi
(c) her brand name recall, and (d) her purchases of thecentered has a greater tendency to purchase cereals
child's favorite cereals. The child's assertiveness index
lowing her view of what is right and healthful. S
was the total of the teacher's ratings. Possible index the child usually prefers presweetened cereals,
scores ranged from 4 through 12; the maximum score child's preference differs from the mother's selec
resulted from rating a child as often verbal, often a and, given her overriding concern for the child's w
leader, often demonstrating initiative, and very per- being, she tends to ignore the child and to purchase w
sistent.
she thinks will do the child the most good.8 In additi
The child-centeredness index was constructed for
the mother low in child-centeredness may be more lik
each mother based on her time involvement in the child's
to Purchase the brands the child prefers to placat
activities. For every club, group, or activity of the child, child.
the mother was given 0, 1, or 2 points depending on When the child's assertiveness is compared with
whether she reported the frequency of her participation mother's purchase behavior, the rank correlation coef
as rarely, sometimes, or often. An additional point wascient (r, = .04) is not significant, so Hypothesis I i
given if the mother reported that she often drove the jected, and it is concluded that the child's degree of a
child to the activity. The total points were divided bytiveness has little effect on whether the mother purch
the number of the child's activities to get a measure ofher child's favorite cereals. This conclusion, howe
average involvement.6 must be made with reservations. The correlation be-
' For a discussion of recommended interviewing procedures
for use with children, see [6]. ' A 2x2 chi-square analysis, corrected for continuity, yielded
6 Several interviewers were used, although, ideally, one re- the following values of chi square and levels of significance re-
searcher should have done all interviewing. As a measure of spectively: .904(.25), .094(.40), .816(.25), .071(.40), and .168(.35).
possible error, a chi-square analysis was performed on several SThe dispersion between the proportion of presweetened
of the mothers' responses that could have been affected by dif-cereals mentioned by the children (.52) and the proportion of
ferent intensities of interviewer probing. No significant differ-presweetened cereals in the marketplace (.42), based on [4], was
ences were found for the mothers' responses obtained by each such that the null hypothesis was rejected at the 99 percent
of the interviewers. level and the alternative hypothesis accepted of a significant
6 This is obviously a crude measure of child-centeredness, but difference between the children's preferences and the market
it has the advantage of needing only data easily obtained. offering. The market offering probably overstates the accepta-
Ideally a psychometric instrument might be used, but would bility of presweetened cereals to the mothers and, if so, the dif-
require further invasion of privacy, already violated by the ference between the mother's and child's independent product
pantry check and the researcher's interviewing of the child out- selections would be even greater than the difference between
side the mother's presence. these statistics.

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 72 JOURNAL OF MARKETING RESEARCH, FEBRUARY 1968

tween the child's assertiveness and the mother's child- cereals there is apparently the stronger effect o
centeredness was significant at the .10 level (r, = .19), mother being in strong disagreement with the child
reflecting the interdependence of the interaction varia-what brands to purchase. Awareness of the streng
bles in the continuing mother-child relationship. Thus it this "gatekeeper" effect has some strong implica
might be expected that the child's assertiveness would for firms marketing any product with which the ch
be negatively related to purchase behavior, as was the eventually involved. Given that the mother is not
mother's child-centeredness. Because there is no nega- a purchasing agent for the child but also an agent
tive relationship suggests that assertiveness of a child superimposes her preferences over those of the child
might increase the likelihood of the child having his is clear that a lot of advertising would be well dir
favorite cereals purchased.9 at the mother,10 even if the mother is not a "consum
The relationship between the mother's brand recall of the product. Without such advertising, the ch
of her child's favorite cereals and her purchase of theseinfluence attempts may be largely ignored if the mo
cereals was significant beyond the .01 level (r, = .49), thinks the brand desired is an inferior good.
but neither the child's assertiveness (r, = .03) nor the The rejection of a child's attempted influence m
mother's child-centeredness (r8 = -.12) was signifi- also stem from the mother's perceptions of the qu
cantly related to the mother's brand name recall. The of information the child possesses, with the perc
fact that the correlation with child's assertiveness is legitimacy of the child's influence attempts a fun
more positive again seems to suggest that assertiveness of the mother's opinion of the promotional stimulus
leads to some increase in brand recall. The negative cor- initiated the child's interest. A commercial the mother
relation apparently results from the child-centered perceives as silly and unconvincing may cause her to
mother who does not tend to buy the child's preferred discredit the product.
cereals. Her recall is prohibited by lack of experience
with the product and also, perhaps, by dissonance re- REFERENCES
duction, so she will not recall that her child's favorite
1. Lewis A. Berey, "A Study of Children's Influence on Par
cereals are not the purchased ones. Buying Behavior," Master's thesis, University of Kan
Since this study is cross-sectional not longitudinal, it 1967.
reports differences between children and between moth-2. George Garnatz, "Children Have Market Influence," Unpub-
ers. Nothing here implies that a given child cannot in- lished paper, Kroger Food Foundation, Cincinnati, 1954.
3. James U. McNeal, Children as Consumers, Austin, Texas:
crease the likelihood of getting his favorite cereal pur-
Bureau of Business Research, University of Texas, 1964.
chased by becoming more demanding and assertive
4. A. C. Nielsen, Competitive Tabulation of Ready-to-Eat Ce-
or that a mother can become more child-oriented and reals-Kansas City District, Unpublished manuscript, A. C.
decrease her purchasing of the cereals her child prefers, Nielsen Company, Chicago, October 1965.
though such generalizations seem intuitively acceptable. 5. William D. Wells and Leonard A. LoSciuto, "Direct Ob-
servation of Purchasing Behavior," Journal of Marketing
Research, 3 (August 1966), 227-33.
IMPLICATIONS 6. William D. Wells, "Children as Consumers," in Joseph W.
Newman, ed., On Knowing the Consumer, New York: John
Though child-centeredness of the mother may Wiley in-
& Sons, Inc., 1966, 138-45.
crease her receptivity to influence by the child, for
1o Recently some children's cereals have been promoted on
' The size of the sample prohibited effective statistical analy- television in the early afternoon and later evening hours. The
sis between assertiveness and purchase while controlling the ef- appeals are directed toward the mother, but to our knowledge
fect of child-centeredness. the consequence of such a strategy has yet to be determined.

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