Often derided as intrusive, manipulative, self-interested and “evil,” market researchers and related professions occupy a vital position in the knowledge ecology and economy of contemporary childhoods. Their expertise centers on ascertaining children’s desires for particular products, product categories, packaging and/or promotional efforts. In some ways remarkably (and perhaps disturbingly for some) similar to academic researchers, market researcher seek to know children’s perspective and labor to elicit their voices. Children’s commercial professionals at times espouse romantic conceptions of the sacred child, worry about the commercialization of children’s lives and strive to uphold the value and integrity of the child’s “voice,” all the while attending to the dynamics of capital.. Examining the place, position and perspective of children’s market researcher thus enables insight regarding the diffusion of particular notions of childhood in relation to consumer practice.
Drawing on interviews with children’s market researchers, brand managers and other market actors in North America, the UK and Europe, on observations at children’s marketing and digital resources conferences and on published trade materials in the field, I analyze and position children’s market researchers as knowledge brokers, moral interlocutors, educators and advocates who transact between and among market actors, parents, non-profit organizations and, at times, the general public. The transactions—as understood by practitioners—extend well past the instrumental needs of information transfer and into the realm of advancing a larger, expansive conceptualization of children as agentive, knowledgeable cultural actors. They thereby engage in a particular kind of kind of moral labor by working to enable the continuity—i.e., erase the boundary—between markets and culture by enacting sympathy, sentiment and even intimacy in the conceptualization and execution of research, often educating both clients and parents in the process.
About the presenterDan Cook
Daniel Thomas Cook is Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, USA and serves as a co-Editor for the journal Childhood. He is author of The Commodification of Childhood and, recently, co-Editor (with J Michael Ryan) of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumers and Consumption. Cook has authored of a number of articles and book chapters on childhood theory, consumer society, play, leisure and urban culture.