Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture |  | Author: Juliet B. Schor
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
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Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 97754
Media: Paperback
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 0684870568
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.230973
EAN: 9780684870564
ASIN: 0684870568
Publication Date: October 4, 2005
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Amazon.com Review
Parents will be tempted to read Born to Buy as a kind of contemporary horror story, with ever more sophisticated marketing wunderkinds as Dr. Frankensteins and their children as the relentless monsters they create. Indeed, it's difficult to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the avariciousness, omnipotence, and ingenuity of the advertising industry Juliet B. Schor portrays when it comes to transforming preschool kids into voracious, 'tude-infused consumers. Intermixing research data with anecdotal illustrations, Schor chronicles the rapid development of a once-shackled industry that now markets R-rated movies to 9-year-olds. The mind boggles at the notion that Seventeen magazine's target readership is now pre-teens. While Schor unearths a surplus of information on the effectiveness of advertising, she's not nearly as adept at proposing effective responses. Reacting to the power and creativity of the consumer culture with politically unfeasible regulation and parental diligence is a little like attacking Frankenstein's creature with torches. Still, Born to Buy is an eye-opening account of an industry that is commercializing childhood with remarkable effectiveness and insouciance. --Steven Stolder
Product Description
Marketing targeted at kids is virtually everywhere -- in classrooms and textbooks, on the Internet, even at Girl Scout meetings, slumber parties, and the playground. Product placement and other innovations have introduced more subtle advertising to movies and television. Drawing on her own survey research and unprecedented access to the advertising industry, Juliet B. Schor, New York Times bestselling author of The Overworked American, examines how marketing efforts of vast size, scope, and effectiveness have created "commercialized children." Ads and their messages about sex, drugs, and food affect not just what children want to buy, but who they think they are. In this groundbreaking and crucial book, Schor looks at the consequences of the commercialization of childhood and provides guidelines for parents and teachers. What is at stake is the emotional and social well-being of our children.Like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia, and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Born to Buy is a major contribution to our understanding of a contemporary trend and its effects on the culture.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 18
 Scathing Analysis of Marketing Practices November 6, 2004
Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA)
70 out of 71 found this review helpful
This book is an extended report on current marketing practices aimed at children and their results. The author begins by noting how marketing practices have changed over the last ten to fifteen years. In the 1970s and 1980s, when many of today's new parents were growing up, laws and industry practices provided some level of protection and privacy for children from the focus of marketing campaigns. Now, however, the gloves are off, and marketing firms shamelessly push everything from junk food to beer, cigarettes, cosmetics, and cars to `tweens, children between the ages of 6 and 12. Schor worked closely with marketing professionals while gathering information for this book so that she could obtain insider views. At the end of the book, Schor notes that these marketers generally feel horrible about what they do and the lengths they go to, but feel they have to continue in order to feed their own families.
The kinds of marketing practices that Schor describes in this book are shocking and outrageous. Many parents have heard of Channel One, an organization that puts TVs in schools for free, but parents may not be aware that in exchange for use of the equipment, administrators agree to force students to watch Channel One program complete with commercials while sitting in their seats and with the volume turned on. But force-feeding commercials to a captive audience of school kids is nothing compared to other current practices, such as having children conduct and even surreptitiously videotape focus-group data from friends at slumber parties that marketers pay them to organize. And then there are the "viral-marketing" campaigns, where kid leaders are sought out because other kids think they're cool, and then paid to convince other kids to buy merchandise, or when college kids are paid to sit in bars and pretend to be ordinary patrons while extolling the virtues of a company's alcoholic beverages.
Schor notes that there are now many ways in which marketing messages are delivered to kids. Kids are exposed to ads through viral-marketing, magazines, and radio. But television advertising seem to be especially hard for youngsters to understand and withstand. Marketers know that if they tell young kids that a product is fun or cool, the kids will pester their parents to get it, and they more the kids see the ads, the more persistent they will be with the pestering. Internet advertising is also a great problem for children, since young children have great difficulty recognizing which parts of the screen are filled with advertising and which parts with content. Marketers even embed Internet games with logos and ads, so that the ads are inseparable from the content.
One result of all this exposure to advertising is that kids these days are more heavily into consumerism than ever before. Schor cites a 1997 time use survey in which it was found that American children now spend, on average, two and a half hours each week shopping, which is twice as much time as they spend reading or going to church, and five times as much as they spend playing outdoors. They are extremely brand conscious with their clothing choices, even well before their teenage years. Schor attempted to find how down-shifting families dealt with all these commercial influences on their children, but found that it was extremely difficult to locate down-shifters with children- -apparently, having children in the house who are so exposed to marketing campaigns makes it difficult to avoid over-consumption.
To see how modern hyper-consumerism is affecting children, Schor conducted a research survey among kids in downtown and suburban Boston. She found that the marketing pitches are causing serious harm to children's well being. Advertisements for junk food, sweets, and soft drinks are feeding the obesity epidemic among our children, and the kids who watch the most TV are the ones getting the fattest. Heavy TV watchers also tend to have the greatest number of behavior problems, they have problems getting along with their parents, and they cannot seem to find satisfaction with life, no matter how much they buy. In contrast, in another study conducted by Thomas Robinson in San Jose, California, it was found that children whose TV watching was reduced also reduced their requests for products advertised on TV.
This book is clearly written and very well researched. Sources are cited through endnotes found at the back of the book (but not numbered explicitly in the main text). There is also an extensive bibliography and index. At times, the text can be rather heavy and overbearing, as Schor buries the reader in fact after depressing fact, so it's not exactly a fun book to read. Nevertheless, the material is extremely important for all of us, parents or not.
I'm convinced. December 13, 2004
Christopher Carstens (San Diego)
37 out of 40 found this review helpful
I'm a practicing child psychologist, and I have followed the media and their impact on children for a number of years. I found Dr. Schor's arguement accurate and convincing. I think the book is a must read for parents seriously concerned about the way big advertising is socializing their kids.
By the way, I recommended the book to my book club -- all men, mostly with children. Me, a child psychiatrist, a lawyer and a bunch of engineer types. Not a group for "chick books." We thought it was one of the best we've read in a couple of years.
Highly Captivating; A Must-Read for Parents! November 10, 2004
Kirsten Crase (Maryland)
17 out of 18 found this review helpful
It is no secret that children today wield more consumer power than ever, and that marketers have discovered them as one of the most profitable niches. But what is the real impact of all of this consumer attention on children?
In her latest book, renowned economist, consumer/family studies expert, and founding New American Dream Board Member Juliet B. Schor argues that this impact is detrimental, and something we ought to be paying much more attention to.
Says Schor, "We have become a nation that places a lower priority on teaching its children how to thrive socially, intellectually, even spiritually, than it does on training them to consume."
Indeed, her documentation of commercialization within schools is truly disturbing. And the results of a survey which Schor administered to a sampling of "tween"-aged children strongly indicate that heavy involvement in consumer culture jeopardizes children's well-being.
Ultimately, Schor argues that we need to take steps to decommercialize childhood, and she lays out several intriguing ideas for how to do so. Highly captivating and packed with vivid examples, this book should be required reading not only for parents but for anyone who cares about the future of our society.
Well-Organized Examination of an Important Social Concern October 11, 2005
A. Reid (NC, USA)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Julie B. Schor's Born to Buy offers an in-depth examination of the way marketers target minors. (Inexplicably, between hardback and soft cover it lost its subtitle: "The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture.") Some of it was enlightening; some of it was shocking; most of it was convincing; all of it was pretty interesting. Schor may be a bit too speculative about the impact of commercialization from time to time, but even so she has the potential to spark dialogue, which is something society sorely needs in respect to the way we're brainwashing our children. I live in a consumer-savvy household. I've been educating my son since he was old enough to watch commercial television about the aims of marketers and the ways commercials mislead you. Even so he's a patsy for every slick snake-oil salesman that comes along. And it is disturbing that while I myself choose what to expose him to on television and in magazines that he reads at home, he might be forced to sit through advertisements in his classroom with no one to offer a balanced perspective on advertiser claims. The halls of junior academia should most decidedly be safe zones, and commercial enterprises should not be allowed to bribe our educators into subverting the public trust. Anyway, enough with my soap box. Schor is better positioned on hers.
I'd give this one 4.5 stars if Amazon would let me. Since it won't, I'll overlook what I perceive as minor weaknesses because they have little impact to the overall appeal and influence of the work.
Great analysis of a creepy industry June 8, 2007
Clay
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Advertising is creepy, advertising to children even creepier. This is not news. But a detailed study of the overall effects is. The bulk of this book presents the results of in-depth study of the industry, both through statistical study of two sample groups of children, and through study of the work environments of the advertisers themselves, with interviews of marketers, parents, teachers, and kids. The author takes into account the history of moral panics, the party line of the industry that "kids are savvy," and the specific work that has been done around small aspects of this issue, such as fast food and violent video games (which I love). The author takes an unusually balanced, non-partisan view, sympathizing with the easily-vilified advertisers she worked closely with as well as kids and parents. Her policy recommendations are unlikely to be implemented, but her analysis of the issue is extremely sharp.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 18
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