Perharps for the fact of becoming a mother and for everything that this involves, you feel suddenly reversed in a world, until this moment, unknown to you and it is then when you see how they grow up and how they learn and evolve and, moreover, when you realized how fast time passes and the constantly changing needs that they experienced. All of this, united with my investigation task, leads me to dive into this fascinating world of market research of children.
Through the market research we try to bring closer the frims with the clients, knowing them better in order to offer them services/products more adapted to their likes, preferences and needs. And for that, it is also important known the children market, even thought studying this target it is always a challenge.
A challenge that acquires importance day to day because this young consumers increasingly become part of the decisions of the buying process at home. What mother has not bought a product in the supermarket at the insistence of his son at the shop shelf? Or at the insistence of the child when seeing the advertisement on the TV? Or what mother has not succumbed under the sentence “my friend has it”? Because we don't have to forget that the main prescriptions are the kids, the classmates or the games that encourage to “have what someone else has.”
A challenge that acquires importance day to day because this young consumers increasingly become part of the decisions of the buying process at home. What mother has not bought a product in the supermarket at the insistence of his son at the shop shelf? Or at the insistence of the child when seeing the advertisement on the TV? Or what mother has not succumbed under the sentence “my friend has it”? Because we don't have to forget that the main prescriptions are the kids, the classmates or the games that encourage to “have what someone else has.”
For that it is important to understand this segment, understand the behavior of the kids. How do they think? How do they act? What do they need? How do they connect with the brands? How do they absorb all the inputs they get? What influences their decisions? How do they interact with their friends?…
But if we analyzed in detail this target, not only we need to understand well their behavior, their concerns and their motivations, we also need to take into account the complexityof this segment Due to their fast evolution, what they like today they don't tomorrow and that is because they are constantly searching for
the novelty. An other aspect to consider is that it is a target that develops themself so quickly for the reason that in the short term they have fundamental changes, concluding that nothing has in common a kid 5 years all with one of 9 or this with one of 12 .
Therefore we must make products/services to measure for them. for each moment of their childhood and it is for this that when we face an investigation with children we need to take into account different facets:
Therefore we must make products/services to measure for them. for each moment of their childhood and it is for this that when we face an investigation with children we need to take into account different facets:
- Headed Target: Important to define what ages we would like to collect because we must do small age cuts (3-5 / 6-8 / 9-11 / 12-14) or we can also have the need to study unique ages (P4 kids, kids from the 1st year of the primary school, …) because their tastes and opinions are really different and what can perfectly fit with a 5 year old child can not fit with over 8 years. Another important topic when working with kids is getting the parents or guardians permissions for children under 14 years old.
- The interviewers: It is important to select well the interviewers because they need to use a language adapted to the children. Furthermore, they need to be able to stabilize a good relationship with the kids in order to extract food information from them.
- The questions and the way of asking them: It is important to adapt the questions to the target language and at their comprehensive level, this implies using comprehensible scales for them and easy to answer, supported in many occasions with draws or incons very easy for them to identify.
- The techniques to use: These are many and varied and it will highly depend on the product/service that we are valuing or on the information we need to apply one or another. At the generic level we can speak about quantitative studies (hall-test, home-test, pre-test and post-test, studies about habits, use or attitudes, conjoint analysis, etc.) or also qualitative studies (kid observation in situ , focus group, projective techniques, etc.).
Finally, it is important to remark that the brands must take into account that we are facing a permeable and influenced target and more than beyond the law, the brand should approach them in a responsible way.
If we keep in mind all these aspects we will carry out a good investigation that will help us approaching these small consumers that are usually the most demanding.
Monica Rabasó
