The Other “Child Study”: Figuring Children as Consumers in Market Research, 1910s–1990s

Abstract

This article examines how notions of "the child" were constructed in marketing research literature from the 19 10s through the 1990s. Drawing on children's industry trade literature, market reports and books, I argue that children have become increasingly portrayed as individualized, autonomous consumers. Over this time period, the desire for consumer products becomes figured by industry observers and researchers as a mode of children's "self expression." The analytic isolation of "the child" in the persona of a "consumer" authorizes a new morality for consumption by construing children's desire for goods as preexistent and thus natural.Markets do not exist in nature, yet everywhere in a capitalist economy they appear as natural and given. They arise and gain outline only when observers have had their gaze prepared to translate social activity into market behavior. Interpreting any activity as market behavior relies upon assumptions about motivations for action and decision making. In the neoclassical conception of competitive markets, the basis of these motivations and decisions is understood as presocial, hence natural, and essentially out of the control of individuals. From the viewpoint of marketers and advertisers, their work consists of nurturing or directing a natural process, not inventing a social one.A market, seen in this way, is thus a way of knowing-a way of apprehending human activity. Markets, and those who work in their service, both demand and create multiple forms of knowledge requisite to render the consumer knowable. Markets are forms of social organization based as much on the individual decisions of individualized actors as on working models of "the consumer" or "actor" from which consuming decisions are seen to arise. From the standpoint of a marketer or advertiser, being able to give the customer what he or she "wants" depends upon being able to make entrke into the dimensions of consumer desire. Desire becomes tangible, and perhaps manipulable, when repeatable measures are taken of its shape, direction, and intensity and applied to the level of an aggregate, such as a population segment.

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