`If I wanted to pose in undershorts with a Pepsi in my hand and Nike shoes on my feet, I could probably buy New York," said Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf about his marketing appeal after Desert Storm (the brand name for the Gulf War). He was only half-joking.
In recent years, Nike has paid $80 million to a basketball player and $20 million to a golfer to endorse the brand. And Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are only the high-profile ones. Think about it. When did you last see a sports figure not endorsing a brand? What hope does a mere parent have against the size and sophistication of that marketing punch?
Never mind the quality, get the brand. It's the sizzle, not the sausage as they say in advertising. And it's relentless. Brands confront us from cradle to grave. Even Ireland is branded now, so is the late Princess Diana, so is "Cool Britannia". There's nothing new about the techniques employed; what is new is their use on children.
The insidious weaving of advertising into every aspect of children's lives is no figment of a paranoid imagination. It's simply that much of it is hidden from parents' view. They masquerade as kids' clubs (Disney, Barbie, Nintendo), as an entertaining movie, a television schools quiz, a school lesson, a game or a puzzle. A child is asked to colour in a picture of a cola drink; he sees an amusing challenge, not an advertisement. And it's no secret that some television series were created specifically to stimulate demand for a toy; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was one of them. So what your child was goggling at back then was just an extra long advertisement. But how were you to know?
"It isn't enough to just advertise on television . . . You've got to reach kids throughout their day . . . You've got to become part of the fabric of their lives", a senior executive of an American advertising company is quoted as saying, in a report by BEUC, the union of European Consumer Associations. And they have.
"They are confronted with it everywhere," says the report, "on television, in magazines, through the mail box, at the sports club, in their bedroom, while playing games, when enjoying breakfast, on their way to school. Even schools have become a silent partner in advertising to children . . ."
Go to the cinema or to a teenies' pop concert; shop for pencils, pasta shapes or crisps, buy a burger, look for a lunch-box or writing paper, watch a toddlers' television show, a parade, or a sports event like the Tour de France (a brand-owners' fiesta). At every turn, the child is bombarded with advertising and mind-crushingly expensive merchandise.
Yes, television is still a big player in the battle for the children's market but in spite of its status as public enemy No 1, it's becoming a relatively minor player in the get-the-kids stakes. In the US, spending on promotions and publicity now exceeds that on advertising in this sector. In Children As Consumers, published this week, authors Barrie Gunter and Adrian Furnham point out that promotions - coupons, premiums, samples and telephone services - work; the payoff is at the point of purchase, where the little targets will consistently want to buy the promoted brand over a non-promoted one.
Public relations is another weapon. Its three main tools are publicity, event marketing (sponsorship), and - note well - school relations. The latter embraces not merely the usual round of education packs, coupons, samples and equipment (computers for supermarket vouchers ring a bell?). It also entails perks such as "further education" for teachers, "usually in hotels in popular regions", says BEUC. Indeed, it concludes: "one might say that schools are gradually turning into an advertising medium".
How much of this children absorb and retain is not fully understood. Since most of the research so far has focused on television, most of the findings have a bearing on this medium. BEUC maintains that a complete understanding of commercial communications, and therefore a critical and questioning attitude towards them, doesn't seem to develop until the age of 12. But Gunter and Furnham are more up-beat. They quote a 1990 survey of nine- and 10-year-olds in Belfast, in which 65 per cent of them reckoned that advertisers tell the truth only some of the time or never.
This sounds encouraging until the caveats come in. It's known for example that certain advertising strategies - such as the use of certain well-known cartoon characters - can often lead to confusion in young minds. Some researchers also argue that a celebrity whose area of fame or presumed expertise is superficially related to the product advertised may be wrongly perceived as having special expertise about the product.
Amid the confusion, some countries are taking no chances. Sweden prohibits television advertising directed at under-12s, while Greece has a blanket ban on toy advertising.
Moving up the age scale is even more confusing. Here the marketer's trick of associating particular brands with celebrities - known to be hugely effective - is exploited to the full. So you're 12 or 13 and want to belong in the cool gang? Well, see that Tiger Woods: he's young, hip, rich, a just-do-it kinda guy. Wanna belong to that club? Of course you do. To most adolescents, to belong is everything. So, look - see what Tiger wears . . .
Generations of adults have fallen for this of course. The world is full of "label louts" prepared to pay an extra £200/£300 for the cachet of the label rather than a garment's functional value. "But they're grown-ups," retorts a mother. "If they want to be idiots with their own money, that's fine by me. What we're talking about here are children, who mostly get the money from their parents."
And there are well-documented instances of what happens when that money or co-operation is unavailable. Stories of children being mugged and stripped of their branded sports gear are not new. It has happened on the streets of Dublin. Most sensible women in recent weeks just raised a resigned eyebrow at tales of football directors ordering Penthouse Pets like pizza and calling local women "ugly dogs". (We know that boys will be boys - especially with women out of earshot). But to hear the same boys boasting about fleecing kids by charging £55 for jerseys they bought in for a fiver? Now that merits cruel and unusual punishment. And like the NIB banking scandal, the next question is: who else is doing it?
Back on a higher plane, the season's hottest sports label is Tommy Hilfiger and the year's coolest confirmation gear a Tommy jacket, retailing in BT2 (Brown Thomas's new sportswear outlet) for £115. They sold 11 of them in two days, six in one glorious 80-minute whirl. Tommy is bright, colourful, better quality that a lot of the young designer gear around, but the fact remains that the jacket will cost Irish parents more than twice what it will cost in the US. Why? Because the market can bear it, says a trade source cheerfully. (Profit margins two and a half times the wholesale price are fairly routine in upmarket shops).
Tommy is exclusive to Brown Thomas, but exclusivity only partly explains this kind of mark-up policy in a market where trainers and tracksuits are bought by children who - far from seeking to be distinctive - merely want alternative uniforms. A pair of Nike/Adidas/Le Coq Sportif/Kappa tear-offs (bottoms with working buttons all down the side) can be bought in any number of sports shops in any street in or outside Dublin, so no exclusivity there.
But the drive to protect the brand and hence the massive profit margins means that they cost much the same everywhere. Discounting in this area means commercial death if the brand-owner retaliates by withdrawing supplies or worse. And who wants to kill the golden goose? Anyway, few retailers have the power to stand up to them, although the supermarket giant, Tesco, gives it a whirl occasionally. It buys up supplies of branded goods which sometimes land in the "grey market" ("grey" doesn't mean shady, only that the identity of the original dumper is obscured) and sells them on at huge discounts. In the past year, consumers have mobbed the checkouts for Levi 501s (500 pairs sold in three days at £30 a pair, a saving of over £20), Nike T-shirts and Calvin Klein underwear at half price. The brand-owners, needless to say, were not amused. This little gracenote aside, what are parents to do? The fact is that the manipulators are here to stay. As one researcher put it: "We hear a lot of condemnation of marketers, particularly advertisers, for pursuing children as consumers, but from a theory of business standpoint, it would be more surprising if they did not."
Protectionism, as in Sweden, doesn't appear to be the answer either. As we know, television is only one factor in the drive for the children's market. The Internet hasn't even entered researchers' reckonings yet.
In a culture where many adolescents work on the principle "I am what I consume and what I have" (to quote Gunter and Furnham), the solution - as always - is education. Parents should teach their children from birth (and show by example), schools should have consumer education programmes and it should be an essential element in the curriculum, where peer pressure is discussed, for example. This way, children will learn a healthy scepticism, to recognise trickery when they see it, and to know their rights.
John Fanning, McConnells Advertising, says: "Since time immemorial, there have been children on every road who had a little more than the other kids. There has always been pressure to get the latest thing. And because the consumer society is more of a factor now, that pressure is greater.
"Children are now consumers in their own right. Marketing has been moving down the age groups and now it has reached the youngest. Remember that teenagers were only invented in the 1950s. How to deal with it? My attitude would be for the parents to put their foot down because, yes, it's going to get worse . . ."
Prof Barrie Gunter agrees: "There's a place for some regulation but there is also a role for parents here. I believe that parents should allow children to gain experience in terms of exposure to all kinds of advertisements. They should sit down together and talk about these things and also instil in them that you can't expect to be bought everything you might want." The good news from John Fanning, however, is that he detects a small cultural shift: "I gather that in certain quarters now, there's a reaction among teenagers against heavily-branded items. It's predictable. People who are extremely fashion-conscious will always react against something that becomes ubiquitous . . ."
A personal note: I returned a pair of £40 children's branded trainers to the suburban branch of a sports shop chain last week. Just six weeks old, the "tongue" on a toe was already peeling off. The young man and woman in charge dispensed with civilities. Without acknowledgment, she took the runners and picked at them in silence for several minutes, shooting occasional dark glances in my direction.
"Did you machine-wash these?" she asked finally. No. "Did she wear them a lot?", asked her colleague. What do you think, I said - they're runners for God's sake. Without comment or apology, they gave me a credit note, failing to mention that I was entitled to my money back. Had they ever seen this problem before, I asked. "No. Never. And we've sold hundreds of them," she asserted. "That's odd," I said (politely, I swear), "because I happen to know of two cases where this has happened with the same brand. Maybe you'd pass that information on to the manufacturer?" She put down the runners and looked me straight in the eye. "You don't have to worry about that," she said. "They make thousands of these every day. They know best." So now you know.
You've got to reach kids throughout their day . . .'
