Agnes Nairn

University of Bristol | UB

The global material wealth rises and young people are heavly exposed to advertising across a range of channels, including rapidly developing social media where material goods are flaunted as symbols of a happy and successful lifestyle, materialism levels across the world seem likely to rise. Given consistent research showing the correlation between...

The aim of this chapter is to describe specific challenges faced when doing international public policy research with children (aged 12 and younger) and adolescents (aged 13–17), and to provide suggested solutions to these challenges. Throughout, we suggest possible solutions, given that we do not think there is one “right” way to “do” research des...

Understandings of consumer vulnerability remain contentious and despite recent developments, models remain unsuitable when applied to children. Taxonomic models, and those favouring a ‘state’- or ‘class’-based approach have been replaced by those attempting to tackle both individual and structural antecedents. However, these are still overly indivi...

The question as to the nature of segments is core to marketing. On the one hand, segments can be viewed as discoverable, enduring entities or on the other, as fluid, created phenomena. This critical distinction has received scant explicit attention in the academic literature. The objective of this paper is to investigate the deep assumptions that u...

Purpose – This paper aims to propose the lens of social practice theory (SPT) as a means of deepening insights into childhood consumer culture. Design/methodology/approach – The data comprise four qualitative interviews and ten focus groups with 58 8-13 year olds in six diverse schools across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Transcripts wer...

Materialism has a generally held connotation that is associated with character deficiencies, self-centeredness, and unhappiness, and most extant research views materialism as having a negative influence on well-being. In this article, we review and synthesise research that supports both positive and negative outcomes of behaviours associated with m...

Aims: In 2010, the English Department of Health launched a radical new public health strategy, which sees individual factors, such as self-esteem, as the key to improving all aspects of young people's health. This article compares the strength of association between key adolescent health outcomes and a range of individual and social factors Metho...

Many of the foundations of lifelong health are laid in adolescence. In 2010, the English Department of Health launched a radical new public health strategy that aimed to improve all aspects of young people's health by promoting self-esteem, confidence, and personal responsibility. Previous research has emphasised the importance of social factors in...

As the role of children in society becomes more prominent, their participation in research seems set to increase. In this paper we review whether we are getting the ethics of children's research right. We show that, since the late 1980s, children have been treated universally as a special case and that they have been accorded their own special set...

Ethical behaviour can have very positive impacts on corporate performance, resulting in higher employee motivation and involvement, lower staff turnover and a better bottom line. This presentation reviews a pioneering case study of how Unilever built a global research ethics awareness programme and how it impacts staff and corporate culture. The pr...

This article explores the ways that French teenage girls use fashion discourse to construct their evolving identity from their recently left childhood to their future as fully grown women. Verbatim texts of 14 phenomenological discussions concerning clothing, accessories, make‐up and fashion are interpreted using the concepts of bricolage (Lévi‐Str...

Although current conceptualizations of materialism have yielded very valuable insights, each seems to be narrowly restricted to its own research purposes. In this article, we offer an expanded view of materialism that stresses the functions of materialistic goal pursuit, the processes by which these functions are developed and implemented, and thei...

This paper examines the measurement of childhood materialism using Schor's (2004) Consumer Involvement Scale. Schor treated consumer involvement empirically as a unidimensional construct, though she suggested that conceptually it may be multidimensional. Using confirmatory factor analysis procedures on data collected from children in the U.S. and U...

Emotive creativity is generally believed to facilitate communication by increasing attention. However, during relaxed TV viewing, psychology suggests we may pay less not more attention to emotive ads. An experiment conducted in a realistic viewing environment found that ads that were high in emotive content correlated with a 20 percent lower level...

Understanding how consumer culture affects children’s wellbeing has recently moved centre stage across the world with concerns growing over the adverse effects of rising levels of materialism. Globally, Unicef (Innocenti, 2007) has painted a bleak picture for the psychological welfare of children living in the world’s most materially rich countries...

Purpose Against a background of social concern about the commercialisation of childhood, the purpose of the paper is to analyse the commercial activity on the favourite web sites of UK children and report the views of a sample of parents and children. Design/methodology/approach The paper reviews the theory underpinning current debate over risks t...

Ambler (in this issue) has been very quick to comment on our recent paper in this journal (Nairn & Fine, IJA, 27(3), 2008) in which we discuss the implications of recent findings from the cognitive sciences for the ethics of advertising to children. We welcome this opportunity to address some of the many misunderstandings, misattributions and mispl...

Purpose The paper seeks to offer a critique of the Piagetian developmental cognitive psychology model which dominates research into children and brand symbolism, and to propose consumer culture theory as an alternative approach. The paper also aims to present the design and interpretation of an empirical study into the roles brands play in the ever...

The debate surrounding the ethics of advertising to children generally centres on the age at which children have developed sufficient cognitive resources both to understand the persuasive intent of marketing messages and to critically evaluate them. In this paper we argue that this debate requires urgent updating to take into account recent and sig...

This paper explores some of the subtle and complex roles which consumption culture may play in the moral development of children. We concentrate on the role of commodified celebrities in children's understanding of moral questions, taking English soccer hero David Beckham as an example. We address three questions: first, how do children draw on cel...

The growth in children's access to the internet has led to the development of thousands of child-oriented websites, many of them heavily laden with commercial promotion. This has led interest groups, parents and lobbyists to question the ethics of targeting children through this new medium and some have even called for it to be banned. This paper e...

Kids are spending more money on goods and services and more time online than ever before. This makes them an incredibly tempting target for online marketing. But what are the data protection issues where children are concerned? This paper considers child data protection using the concepts of knowledge, control and parental involvement; it reminds u...

The paper presented here is an abridged and adapted version of an article by Pierre Berthon, Agnes Nairn and Arthur Money which appeared in Marketing Education Review, 13, 2 (Summer) 2003. The objective of the paper in the IJMR now is to encourage practitioners and academics alike to build their own research on the foundations which have already be...

This article explores the way in which advertising builds brand relationships. Behavioral research by Watzlawlck, Bavelas, and Jackson (1967) suggests it is the emotional not the rational content in communication that drives relationships. This assertion is tested using a new research copy-testing system-the CEP™Test-and the results confirm that fa...

The ethical credentials of advertising in regard to young people have been questioned for some time. It is thus intriguing that the same scrutiny has never been directed at the concomitant practice of segmentation. Market segments are usually assumed to exist quite independently of the targeting process and are thus not considered within the same a...

The Sandler report of 2002 found a £27bn shortfall in the UK nation's savings. The report highlights the industry changes necessary for citizens to increase investment for their future and thus reduce this deficit. The mass of this investment activity will take place through high street financial services organisations. Sandler suggests changes in...

This article is about affective advertising, defined as that which works more on our emotions and feelings than on our knowledge and beliefs. This sort of advertising can be processed effectively at relatively low levels of attention and as a result does not always perform well on recall measures. We compare the most popular recall-based metric cla...

Much published work over the years has pointed to the differences between business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) marketing. An undesirable by-product of this sometimes misdirected distinction is that managers working within B2B environments have generally not considered the use of what are seen as B2C techniques, such as multivar...

Cluster analysis has been successfully used in market segmentation for several decades. However, alongside evidence for the value of the technique, a number of studies have highlighted the importance of testing the reliability and validity of cluster solutions. Yet, in a time-poor technologically sophisticated age when alluring output falls effortl...

This paper introduces the “paradigm funnel” as a research tool and suggests how it could be used to produce enlightened analysis of complex literatures. This article first explores the use of Kuhn's notion of a paradigm. It goes on to introduce the notion of a “paradigm funnel” Next it explains the four level construction of the funnel and points o...

The customer relationship management (CRM) industry is set to be worth $76.3 billion by 2005 but over 50% of projects will fail to meet benefit objectives. While CRM nirvana is the attainment of profitable one-to-one relationships, current activity is concentrated on segmentation. As technology has moved segmentation from simple classification towa...

The customer relationship management (CRM) industry is set to be worth $76.3 billion by 2005 but over 50% of projects will fail to meet benefit objectives. While CRM nirvana is the attainment of profitable one-to-one relationships, current activity is concentrated on segmentation. As technology has moved segmentation from simple classification towa...

For over half a century market segments have been considered objective groupings of individuals which marketers identify, understand, and target with advertising messages. The process of market segmentation has, therefore, occupied a position of moral neutrality. An increasingly popular method of segmentation is by consumer personality, with advert...

Everyone is still talking about customer relationship management (CRM) but business cases demonstrating the tangible benefits which it brings to a firm remain scarce. This paper addresses the question of whether CRM really is a helpful management concept or whether it is just another fad. Evidence on both sides of the debate are presented. The conc...

This paper does not deal with sexist marketing communications. Neither does it explore gender-stereotyped imagery in promotional messages. Such dimensions are mostly concerned with how men and women are portrayed in advertising, based on perceptions of how the socialisation process influences gender roles. Instead, the focus is on information-proce...

Consumers and organisations are increasingly considering longer term sustainability issues when they purchase or supply goods or services: "green buying" appears to be gaining momentum. However, progress is slow and the percentage of green purchases has remained static at 2% for the last two years. This paper suggests that a network approach to the...

This report presents the results of the first two stages of an ongoing study conducted by researchers at the University of Bath into the role of brands in the everyday lives of junior school children (ages 7-11) in the UK. Stage 1 was completed in October 2004 and Stage 2 in July 2005. The focus of the research is understanding the meaning of brand...

We have witnessed a dramatic increase in and intensification of children's exposure to commercially sponsored media in recent years both in Europe and the USA. Children interact with brand messages on an almost continual basis and their spending power is increasing all the time. Yet, it is our contention that the developmental psychology paradigm w...

Direct marketing can target individuals, but not merely according to name and address drawn from lists - it can also use different content and tone of voice. But is the 'gender effect' such that men and women should be targeted differently? This paper reports a research programme which explores this issue. Ten group discussions were conducted aroun...