Consumer Behavior

I don’t believe the family unit is dead. I believe that it has just been evolving over time. As stated in the textbook, it is true that the proportion of people living in a traditional family structure, consisting of a married couple with children, has declined, many other types of families are growing rapidly. I believe that, as stated, family units are just shifting and changing with the times. It is becoming less and less the couple with children, and more often than not a household is headed by a new segment such as homosexual, divorced or childless people. This new ‘family unit’ isn’t a bad thing for marketers either, they need to understand these new shifts in the market and develop new strategies to target these new segments and demographics which may not be the norm from years ago. Although the ‘family unit’ is changing, I believe a lot of us still picture the ‘perfect family’ with a big white house, married man and women, two children and a dog; although this is usually not the case anymore, people still see this image and often are drawn to trying to reach that unattainable goal.

I think it’s difficult to say marketers rob children of their childhood. There has been so much advertising to children in one way or another, whether it be from watching a commercial on television during Saturday morning cartoons, or catching a billboard while walking down the street, we often forget or acknowledge a fact of while children weren’t advertised to and to what could be a “childhood”. I believe advertising has become synonymous with childhood and the way children develop. As it states in the textbook, “Children undergo a process of socialization whereby they learn how to be consumers.” These practices have been going on for children forever. They may learn through advertising now by marketers, but before that, they could have been learning the same social and consumer behaviours from word of mouth before advertising was forced through the media. I don’t believe...