Cultivate Kids as Future Customers

For most retailers, children are an influence market, giving suggestions to the adults on what to purchase. The chief evidence can be seen in the cereal aisle at any grocery store. But it’s much more than this. Surveys find that about one-third of parents say their kids also actively participate in deciding which automobile the parents should buy.
     For all retailers, children are a future market, with their high potential to remain or become primary customers in five to fifteen years. Because of children's roles as a future market, you've a responsibility to the wellbeing of your business and your community to cultivate kids into good consumers.
     University of Minnesota research indicates that a prime time for doing this is when children are ages 7 to 11. Around age 7, children's consumer skills start to blossom. Over the next few years, they become much better at recognizing the benefits made possible by product features, moving beyond a focus on the product features themselves. Their understanding increases for the correlation between money and value. They gain a greater ability to compare products and to do it on more than one dimension (such as ease of use and duration of use) at the same time. Their abilities grow to recognize that more is not always better, such as a strong sour taste being well-suited to pickles but not to peanut butter.
     Attending to purchasing habits of 7 to 11 year olds isn't only to build profits for the far future, though. For some product categories you carry, kids might be a less-than-obvious primary market right now. Consider cell phones. For the parents, the target appeal is they won't let the tracks of their kids, when they're away, go cold. On the other hand, for the kids, having a cell phone is way cool.