Children and Their Brand Relationships

EXTENDED ABSTRACT - In this article, we explore children’s socialization into consumer-brand relationships. In order to understand young children’s brand consumption, we interviewed twenty parent-child dyads, comprised of ten children aged six- to seven-years old, ten children aged nine- to ten-years old, and twenty parents, recruited through a snowball sample strategy Four relationship styles emerged from the data: uberbrand relationships, lifestyle relationships, fad relationships, and phase relationships. These four brand relationship patterns are distinct from one another along three key properties: duration, marketer involvement, and interdependence on the brand (i.e., the ways that the brand intertwines with children’s lives in everyday usage). Subsequently, we propose a research agenda that poses basic questions about children’s brand relationship quality and about the brand-related meanings and consumer practices that develop over childhood.

Citation:

Patricia Robinson and Steven Maxwell Kates (2005) ,"Children and Their Brand Relationships", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 32, eds. Geeta Menon and Akshay R. Rao, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 578-579.