Abstract

Children are an important target group for marketing. They are subject to an increasing number of advertisements and products immediately directed and tailored to them. In the case of children, however, this increasing attention and targeting by marketers meets consumers whose cognitive skills need yet to be developed, who lack experience with regard to sales strategies and market mechanisms. It can be assumed that at least in some areas, children are not able to make their purchase decisions diligently and reflectively. This raises questions of challenges faced by children at the point of sale, how competent they are and how they apply coping strategies to compensate for potential lacks of competence.
Our study contributes to the literature on purchasing literacy by proposing a model that can explain influence factors on children’s purchasing literacy. The study presents a detailled account on whether the perception of students conforms to the perception of their parents or whether it diverges. By comparing children’s selfperceptions and the teachers’ and parents’ interpersonal perceptions, the children from the qualitative study tend to imitate their parents’ behavior in many ways. However, parents are not aware of this. One possible reason might be that parents often try to avoid taking their children along for their weekly shopping. We also accompanied children while doing purchases. In this case, the guide-line-based interviews have shown that in most cases, children are not able to transfer the knowledge that they acquire at school to shopping situations. Thus, the parents’ and teachers’ ideals of how purchasing literacy should develop seem to at least partly differ from the needs and challenges children are facing in real shopping situations.