Tag Archives: consumers

In a marketing class I was taking, I learned about the term “clutter”. According to Wikipedia.com clutter means,

“the large volume of advertising messages that the average consumer is exposed to on a daily basis. This phenomenon results from a marketplace that is overcrowded with products leading to huge competition for customers.”

Think about the enormous amounts of marketing and advertising campaigns that you are bombarded with on a daily basis, it’s truly mind boggling, everywhere you go there are product placements.  After reading Lisa Jacobson’s article on child consumers, I realized what a large role they place in this as well. Although the articles study only goes until 1940, its concept still applies today more so then ever, with the internet, with television, and all the magazines and books that children look through.  Children have a much harder  time distinguishing between their wants and needs, so if we see ten advertisements we may want all of them, but realize that we only need / can afford a few of them, children on the other hand feel that they would need all ten products. In the article Lisa talks about class distinction, and how children in the lower classes cannot get everything they want, which can lead events that are discussed in this clip: Children Consumers. It also talks about the problems that products can create between parent and child, when the child does not receive everything they desire, and begins to question/disobey their parent’s authority. It’s a slippery rope, because you cannot hide them from all of the advertisements, if you buy them everything they seek, they will become spoiled and wont learn the value of a hard dollar. On the other hand if you don’t it might create problems in your relationship. How do you find a viable compromise?