Title:
Traces of deep processing in young children’s reactions to healthy and unhealthy food endorsements
The worldwide concern about the ongoing obesity epidemic and the onset of this epidemic early in childhood has sparkled quite some marketing communications research on food choices in young children. Prior research (e.g., De Droog, ValkenburgBuijzen, 2011; Smits & Vandebosch, submitted) demonstrated that 4-7 year old children are susceptible to the persuasive effect of the often used product endorsers. The same studies demonstrated that the use of similar but unknown endorsers have comparable effects and that endorser effects even extend to the domain of healthy foods instead of the unhealthy ones that are usually endorsed. Recently, De Droog, Buijzen and Valkenburg (in press) also demonstrated that these unfamiliar endorsers are particularly effective amongst 4-6 year olds when they have a conceptual relation with the product they endorse. A non-celebrity rabbit thus becomes an equally effective endorser of a carrot compared to a familiar celebrity character like Dora. In the present paper, we explore the consequences of these findings in three different steps (and their corresponding studies).
Are children in their early childhood cognitively able to elaborate on the relation between an endorser and the product they endorse? The studies by De Droog et al. (in press) seem to suggest they do. To further explore this, we did focus group research with 5-year olds (14 children) and interviewed these children about the conceptual relations between familiar (celebrity) endorsers and a whole range of healthy products. This is in line with current offerings in a Belgian supermarket where Studio 100 figures endorser conceptually related fruits and vegetables. Indeed, these young children seem to understand the conceptual mapping between endorser and product. For instance, they understand that a gnome (Kabouter Plop) should endorse small tomatoes whereas a pirate (Piet Piraat) should do so for bananas (because he makes exotic adventures). The focus groups circumstances are, of course very much of an explicit and forced elaborated nature. A more implicit research measurement is proposed next.
Are children able to focus their own attention to both the endorser and the product? Again, the results by De Droog and colleagues seem to suggest they do, but we wanted to assess whether this also shows up in the self-generated cognitions that are a core concept in adult persuasion process models like the Elaboration Likelihood Model. Therefore, 6-7-year olds participated in an experiment where they looked at healthy or unhealthy food either endorsed or not by a celebrity character. The prime task for these children was to sum up what they thought about when looking at these pictures. We subsequently coded their self-generated cognitions as either pertaining to the product or the endorser and as positive, neutral or negative. Compared to the conditions without an endorser, participants in the conditions with the endorser generated more cognitions. A large part of these cognitions was about the endorser. More importantly, however, the endorsers did not completely distract the children from the food items. This implies that these children were already able to partly avoid acentration tendency (the idea that these captivating features attract all of the attention of children; Livingstone & Helsper, 2006). Also interesting was that these participants produced mixed valence cognitions, particularly for the unhealthy foods, signifying that they were already partially able to initiate counter-argumentation (see also Buijzen, De Droog & Owen, 2010).
If so, does this imply then that they are also able to demonstrate attitude decrease in case of incongruent endorsement? De Droog et al. (in press) compared different conditions of congruent unfamiliar endorsers with a “control” condition of an incongruent familiar endorser. The previous results suggest, however, that this latter condition in itself might be a special case. To investigate whether product-endorser incongruence indeed affects attitudes, we set up an experiment for 6-year olds. These children first produced baseline attitudes for healthy and unhealthy foods. Then they saw the same products again, endorsed by either Sportacus or Bart Simpson. Sportacus is a familiar character congruent with healthy food, whereas Bart Simpson is congruent with unhealthy food. Compared to the baseline, both endorsers resulted in an increase for the unhealthy foods showing no incongruence effects for Sportacus. For the healthy foods, however, no increase occurred for Sportacus-endorsed foods, whereas Bart Simpson as an endorser resulted in a decrease. Here children clearly showed counterargumentation.
In sum three studies point out that 4-7 year olds are able to engage in a somewhat elaborated processing style that even suggests the early development of processes we often ascribe to older age groups.