CHILDREN'S INFLUENCES ON FAMILY DECISION MAKING
CHILDREN'S INFLUENCES ON FAMILY DECISION MAKING
INTRODUCTION
Children who are initiators have most influence on TVs, mobile phones and computer equipment, and least influence on juice, soft drinks and cereals. The knowledge of family buying roles is important in developing appropriate marketing strategies. The marketer can use this knowledge to identify the family members who play the roles of initiator and influencer for particular products and then develop an appropriate communication strategy targeted at these members to evoke the desired response. Since children tend to influence product decisions that are relevant to them, marketers must appeal to children as much as parents. Furthermore children's involvement with a product category has a positive impact on children's level of influence on family decision making. Therefore marketers could try to identify the types of products that appeal to children. By doing so, they could plan more child-friendly marketing activities, making it easier to connect with the children in order to increase their involvement.
Theories of children's influences Theories about family consumption are important because they help us answer questions of group consumer behavior. Resources theory is one theoretical approach used in explaining the role of children in a family decision-making.
RESOURCES THEORY
Resources are the main source of power. A resource is defined as anything that one partner may make available to another, helping the latter satisfy his or her needs or attain his or her goals. The balance of power will be on the side that partner who contributes the greater resources to the marriage''. Resources include tangibles such as money and property. Intangible resources include education and occupational training (Blood and Wolfe, 1960, p.12).
Resources are also defined as any property of a person or group that can be made available to other's needs. In society, individuals have to negotiate to secure the resources they want or need. The resources of one person may be exchanged for those of another person (Dallos and Dallos, 1997, p. 14). Tashakkori et al. (1989, p. 91) suggest that resources determine parental power, based on different sources, including education level, age and family interaction.
McDonald (1980) proposes that five types of resources serve as bases from which family members may derive power. They are normative, economic, affective, personal and cognitive resources. Normative resources are the family's values and norms. Economic resources refer to the monetary control exerted by the income earner. Affective resources encompass interpersonal relationships and belongingness. Personal resources include physical appearance and role competence. Cognitive resources refer to the intelligence of family members. For example, it is possible for the husband or wife to use normative and economic resources in family decision making (Moschis and Churchill, 1978), whereas the child is using affective and cognitive resources in the family interaction.
Sheth and Mittal (2004, p. 325) elaborate that cognitive resources are a basis for a reversal of influence in family. The shift occurs when a child grows up and is exposed to new knowledge. He or she begins to depend less on the parental role model. Thus, when children's preferences differ from those of their parents, they are able to exercise their influence. There are two reasons for reverse influence. First, children may have greater knowledge and expertise than their parents in specific purchasing areas such as new media products. Second, there is a family norm, known as democratic justice in which each family member is given a voice. Many parents may consider giving their children the opportunity to influence their preferences in family decisions. This demonstrates that sons and daughters are citizens of the family and have their own rights.
The child may use affective tactics to increase his or her influence on family decisions. Wimalasiri (2004, p. 276) gives a detailed classification of influence tactics used by children to elicit the desired parental purchasing behavior: pressure tactics, upward appeal, exchange tactics, coalition tactics, ingratiating tactics, rational persuasion, inspirational appeals and consultation tactics. Rogers (1974) defines power as a capacity or an ability to influence others. Individual power must be viewed relative to specific social systems and the positions a person occupies within a given social system. It should be noted that power is linked to the family and the individual's specific role in the family. Power broadly refers to all kinds of influence between family members. Galvin et al. (2004, p. 209) agree with the argument that influence occurs when family members use their power to try to change or modify others' behaviors or beliefs.
Corfman and Lehmann's (1987) ideas are an extension of those originally developed by Rogers (1974). Power is also defined as the ability of one person to change another person's attitudes, beliefs or behavior in an intended direction. They add that relative influence in the family can be related to power-related resources and power use-related goals. Power-related resources correspond to passive influence and influence attempt. Power use-related goals are the costs and benefits of exercising power and are either personal goals or task goals.
When someone associates a higher income with greater power, the partner earning the higher wage is more likely to be the decision-maker. Wages should be positively related to the frequency of decision-making (Elder and Rudolph, 2003, p. 296). To test their resources hypothesis on couples only, Blood and Wolfe (1960) interviewed about 900 wives in Detroit and asked who made the final decision in family decisions. They drew the conclusion that most families had a joint (equalitarian) decision structure. However, there were families in which the husband made the most decisions (25 per cent) and a few wives dominated families (3 per cent). Thus, in the early literature on family decision-making, resources theory is supported for couples with no children. Does resources theory apply to families where children are involved? It is expected that the child, having has less economic resources, is thus less influential in family consumption decisions.
THE ROLE OF CHILDREN
The role that children play in making decisions concerning the entire family unit has prompted researchers to direct attention to the study of influence of children. Children use various influencing tactics to persuade the parents to comply with their demands. Parent's responses vary from outright denial to total acceptance. The amount of influence exerted by children varies by product category and stage of the decision making process. For some products, they are active initiators, information seekers, and buyers; whereas for other product categories, they influence purchases made by the parents. The purchasing act is governed by how they have been socialized to act as consumers.
MAKING YOUR OWN WAY
Children varied in the degree to which they regarded themselves as competent to make their own decisions. Children recognised that they were in the process of learning how to make decisions for themselves and were aware of how the example set by parents was important to the development of their own capacity to make decisions. However, children did make claims to both an entitlement and a competence in decision-making in relation to their growing sense of individual identity and independence.
FRIENDS AND OTHER FAMILIES
The experience of friends and other families had little bearing on patterns of decision- and rule-making for children at this age, except where this conflicted with or compromised children's developing sense of their own social identity. This was often expressed in terms of 'fitting in' with their peers.
MOTHERS AND FATHERS
Most of the children in the study appeared to assume that their parents (even those few who lived apart) were in agreement over their decisions and in the interpretation and application of family rules. However, many children identified striking differences in the roles of their mothers and their fathers, usually along traditional gendered lines. For most children mothers, not fathers, were the most frequently consulted source of domestic authority.
Children's influence is also seen to vary by who are the user and the perceived importance of the product to the user (Foxman and Tansuhaj, 1988). Jensen (1995) proposed that parents' involvement is a function of financial risk, their role as users, and their perception of product differentiation whereas children are mostly involved in the purchase due to their role as users. Geuens et al. (2002) observed that the relative influence of children varies by the extent to which the parents are busy. Foxman et al. (1989) concluded that children tend to have more "say" in the purchase of products that are less expensive and for their own use. Several factors were found to significantly affect agreement among family members regarding adolescent purchase decision influence: families witnessing greater influence had older fathers, a concept-oriented communication style, fewer children, and a mother who worked fewer hours outside the house.
TV (for the 8-10 year-olds) the negative coefficients increase by sub decision stages, meaning that older children's influence increases from category to brand to model. The opposite is the case with mobile phones, TV (for the 5-7 year-olds), and vacations, where the older children's influence decreases as the decision making becomes more specific. The result for beverages can be explained in part by the fact that children acquire new skills and tastes as they grow older. Juice is dropped in favor of soft drinks (see Hansen et al., 2002, p. 28). Hereby hypothesis H3 is confirmed: the impact of child age varies, depending on the stage of the decision making process.
Children exercise quite strong influence on family decision making processes in connection with purchases, particularly in the case of products relevant to them (like cereal, juice, soft drinks, and mobile phones) and during the initiation stage. Children's influence also varies with sub decision stages. The gender of the children does not contribute significantly to parents' perception of their children's influence.
CONCLUSION
Children are effectively fitting into the consumer role owing to time pressures and income effects in dual career families. Moreover, exposure to mass media and discussions with parents ensure that children are not only aware of the new brands avail-able, but also know how to evaluate them on various parameters. While younger children clearly affect parental behavior and purchases, adolescents have full cognitive development and an understanding of the economic concepts required for processing information and selection. An analysis of children as consumers helps in the formulation of marketing strategies by identifying the motivations, interests, and attitudes of children who show the greatest involvement in making purchases in a specific product category. It has been seen that they act as purchasing agents for the family and are delegated the task of purchasing products which they themselves do not consume. Products for which children act as purchasing agents should be identified to help marketers understand the features that are preferred by these purchasers and to help direct appropriate messages towards them.
References
Blood, R.O. and Wolfe, D.M. (1960), Husbands and Wives: The Dynamics of Married Living, Free Press, Glencoe, IL.
Corfman, K.P. and Lehmann, D.R. (1987), Models of cooperative group decision making and relative influence: an experimental investigation of family purchase decisions'', Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 14, pp. 1-13.
Dallos, S. and Dallos, D. (1997), Couples, Sex and Power, Open University Press, Buckingham.
Foxman, Ellen, Patriya S. Tansuhaj, and K. M. Ekstrom. 1989. "Family Members' Perception of Adolescents Influence in Family Decision-Making." Journal of Consumer Research, 15 (March), 482-91.
Hansen, F. (2002). Studiet af brn som forbrugere. In Hansen, F., Martensen, A., Halling, J., Lauritsen, G.B., Nielsen, J.C. & Puggard, B., Brns opvkst som forbrugere (9-26). Copenhagen, Denmark: Samfundslitteratur (in Danish).
McDonald, G.W. (1980), Family power: the assessment of a decade of theory and research,
1970-1979'', Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 42, pp. 841-54.
McDonald, M. and Lavelle, M. (2001), Call it kid-fluence''', US News & World Report, Vol. 131 No. 4, 30 July, pp. 32-5.
Sheth, J.N. and Mittal, B. (2004), Customer Behavioru: A Managerial Perspective, South-Western Thomson, Mason, OH.
Wimalasiri, F. (2004), A cross-national study on children's purchasing behavior and parental response'', Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 21 No. 4, pp. 274-84.
Innovative Marketing, Volume 4, Issue 4, 2008008
Young consumer's Vol. 10 no. 2 2009 page 147
CHILDREN'S INFLUENCES ON FAMILY DECISION MAKING
By: valarmathi.a
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