Consumer socialisation

Children have to acquire appropriate consumer-related skills, behaviour orientations, knowledge, and attitudes to participate effectively in the marketplace of adults. Preadult consumer socialisation is also necessary for children to deal with practical problems in their childhood market. Research on consumer socialisation has been carried out mainly from a psychological perspective or a marketing perspective. Both approaches have inherent faults in terms of their ability to provide a full picture of children's consumer socialisation, particularly with respect to children's cultural milieu. Within this paper we sketch an integration of these perspectives that we believe addresses some of their shortcomings. At the core of our "scaffolding" approach are three consumption-related concepts that provide children with a mental scaffold for interpreting consumption experiences, namely, ownership, money as a medium of exchange, and price. These concepts, once grasped, provide the mental scaffold for integrating consumption experience and for negotiating its meaning in a culturally appropriate and acceptable way. These scaffolding blocks are discussed and, to show how they underpin and support children's consumer socialisation, we then examine the role of the family as a primary context for children's consumer socialisation. Within both these sections we examine the cross-cultural research that informs our knowledge of the universality or otherwise of the research findings.