Pester power

“Pester Power” or “The Nag Factor”, as the phenomenon is known in US literature, is the “tendency of children, who are bombarded with marketers’ messages, to unrelentingly request advertised items”. The phrase is used to describe the negative connotations of children's influence in their parents buying habits.

Due to children's buying influence growing in line with average household income, some commentators now refer to the home as being a filiarchy due to the power that children may hold in the household's consumer choices. This makes pester power relevant for the modern household. Pester Power is commonly used by marketing companies to target the 4–6 years old category as they have limited disposable income of their own, and consequently do not have the means to buy goods themselves.

The growth of the issue of Pester Power is directly related to the rise of child advertising. Mr Potato Head was the first children’s toy to be advertised on television, this aired in 1952, and paved the way for Pester Power as pitching to children was seen to be an innovative new idea. It is now a convention for children’s products to be directly marketed at children. Through Pester Power, children have assumed role of being the 'ultimate weapon' in influencing family spending because of the how they consistently nag their parents. As a result, children have been likened to being a "Trojan Horse" within the modern household for marketing companies.

One key criticism of Pester Power is that it implies repeated nagging by the child. However, young children may not be eloquent enough to have any other feasible methods of persuasion, and consequently the notion that adverts are specifically designed to encourage young children to nag could be argued not to be the case.

The average child in the United States sees more than 3,000 advertisements per day across a variety of different media forms (as of 1999) and the average Mexican Child will see 12,000 adverts for junk food every year. Consequently, different methodologies are employed in order to maximize a child’s influence in a household's purchasing habits. Exploiting Pester Power as a marketing tool to try to influence buying habits can take more than one form, crucially as the “way a child nags isn’t always the same.” Indeed, there are a large array of different ways in which children can pester.

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Wikipedia