Kids learn early to interpret and deconstruct brands. Only by offering freedom of appropriation and refraining from pre-packaged worlds you can speak to them.

Children face growing pressure from firms and media as consumers and influencers of adult consumers. Positions are polarized on this: scholars, educators and parents increasingly demand an ethical approach from firms; firms invest more heavily in kids and teens as target markets with effective and sophisticated marketing campaigns.

Recent research on consumer behavior shows a more complex and less pessimistic pictures. Children, like adults have grown used to live in a market society, and interpret its products and goods, its promises and illusions in terms of symbolic value.

Living in a cornucopia of products and ads, kids learn to distinguish and discriminate. Being born in a consumer society, they recognize brands as part of popular culture, as source of cultural identity. Without being fully aware of it, teen-agers read the market and its cultural meanings better than adults. They have an instinctive capacity to manipulate and deconstruct commercial messages, away from their intended business purposes. On the other hand, children are developing an embryonic form of consumer agency, of self-definition and autonomy in consumer choice that challenges traditional notions of corporate power.

Protecting children in a commercial culture means to empower their freedom for self-affirmation and self-determination, leaving them free to assign their own symbolic meanings to market objects while giving them a space for an autonomous material expression of culture. Successful corporations will be those who learn how to enter in conversations with this new and more sophisticated generation of consumers. They won’t have to invest in huge sponsorships to make themselves interesting, but they will have to help kids become creators and agents of their own world, leaving them open space for a free expression. Freedom of appropriation fosters imagination and original creation of meaning, because kids are the most productive dreamers there can be.

by Stefania Borghini,
at the Institute of Corporate Management and Economics, Università Bocconi