In the tradition of No Logo and Fast Food Nation, Buy Buy Baby investigates how today’s consumer economy markets to infants and toddlers.Buy Buy Baby is a powerful expose of how multi-national toy and media corporations use aggressive marketing techniques to snare the ultimate consumer – your baby or toddler.While it’s no secret that toy and media companies manipulate the insecurities of parents to sell them products, Buy Buy Baby reveals how these corporations sponsor and use the latest research in child development to sell directly to the 0-3 age group.Following scientific research in the late 1990s that showed that babies develop and make more significant connections between the ages of 0-3 than at any other point in their lives, an explosion of products aimed specifically at this group came onto the market. Under the guise of having 'educational benefit', we have witnessed the rise of everything from the Teletubbies to Barney, all feeding into the anxiety of parents keen to raise 'smart' kids. More sinisterly however, has been the rise in awareness of this age-group of brands, the top names including Cheerios, Disney, Pop-tarts, McDonalds, Coke and Barbie.As a parent and as a business journalist, author Susan Gregory Thomas, former senior editor at US News & World Report who has written for Time and Glamour amongst others; is uniquely qualified to write on this subject. She reveals the growing evidence that some of the products aimed at young children have little or no 'educational benefit' and that these toys could even impair early development.Moreover she examines the huge negative impact of selling products to such young children and argues that kids are now experiencing the anxiety, hyper-competitiveness and depression usually found in adults and caused by the effects of rampant consumerism.Buy Buy Baby is an important contribution highlighting a burning contemporary issue.
Оглавление
Susan Thomas Gregory. Buy, Buy Baby: How Big Business Captures the Ultimate Consumer – Your Baby or Toddler
Dedication
Contents
Epigraph
Introduction
1. Learn Something New Every Day
2 “There’s a New Mom in Town”
3 “It’s Like Preschool on TV”
4. A Vast and Uncontrolled Experiment
5. Elmo’s World
6. The Princess Lifestyle
7. Anything to Get Them to Read
8. Developing Character in Preschool
Conclusion: A Defense of “Nothing”
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Copyright
About the Publisher
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FOR ZUZU, FRANKIE, AND TIN
Title Page
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At that point in technology history, computers enjoyed a virtually unimpeachable reputation as educational instruments. The overwhelming sentiment at the time was that by using computers even for the most mundane tasks, children were not only learning a particular skill but were also becoming smarter in the process. A great many people, of great social and economic influence, seemed to believe that “kids today” were smarter because they could do things like insert a CD-ROM into the appropriate disk drive and build Web sites using HTML software. But the archaeological and anthropological record shows that children have always begun using the predominant tools of their culture at around four or five years old. Kids were no more sophisticated for using computers in Newton, Massachusetts, in the mid-nineties than for learning how to use bows and arrows in the prehistoric Lenape nation. The real change, it seemed, was the influence of marketing: people believed it.
That was certainly true for the technology industry as a whole. Ingenious marketing and public relations campaigns could take a great deal of the credit for the heady success of the tech economy of the nineties. I was especially impressed by the Palm marketing team, which did a phenomenal job of convincing not just harried dot-com CEOs but everyone else who had relied on paper datebooks that they would not be able to get organized without a hundred-dollar hand-held digital gizmo. It was common knowledge that Microsoft and Intel kept upping the ante with new versions of Windows that demanded ever-faster processors; then PR departments helped drive the fear of becoming obsolete, which accelerated the upgrade cycle. Internet providers fed concerns that if you didn’t have a Web site, you would be denied access to the digital age.
