Advertising on School Grounds

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Advertising on School Grounds: An Unethical Marketing Practice
The minds of the young ones are like sponges; they grasp as fast but their analytical skills are still scanty. Child psychiatrists have imposed strongly on how the youth are able to develop as fast as they do because of the capacity of their young minds to grasp what they want to learn about (Goldstein. 212). Along with this though, the experts also recognize the fact that the capacity of a child to critically analyze what he sees or hears as a means of giving meaning to such matters is still unsupported by facts and theories that are most likely available to older individuals confronted with the same ideas (Adcock, 15). This is the primary reason why it is not advisable for marketing portfolios and paraphernalia to be presented and displayed on school grounds.
Relatively though, as strategic as modern marketers are, knowing the fact listed herein about young individuals whose minds are still budding out and are still developing gives them determinable idea that marketing or creating ads that would attract children would be the best option they could take in order to up their sales in specific products that children might be interested in (Adcock, 15). Some marketers of common household products even go through the process of examining how to make their product presentations more child-friendly just so to get the attention of the younger ones.

Is this a valid condition of marketing? Technically, marketers such a move as likely justified simply because they are merely utilizing these tactics to make the children the ‘bridge’ towards their goals of inviting the parents to buy the products they are offering.
Question is, do the children really know what is best for their families, let alone for themselves? As mentioned earlier, the deciding capacity of the young ones is often scanty and not accounted for to be fully responsive to the actual demands of how an adult would think. However, the fact that the parents [almost a majority of them] would likely accept the condition of being pressured by their children and giving in to such pressure, marketers find such approach effective thus motivating them to continue using kid-friendly ads as a means of bridge to their actual targets, the parents.
Tactical as it is, and successful as it may seem, the utilization of children’s scanty decision making is considered unethical in many forms. This is especially true when it comes to making use of such marketing approach within the school grounds where there would be numbers of children flocking around the grounds (Kardes, 15). Children would of course see the ads, create pictures in their mind, and probably, if they are invited as much, they would be calling their parents’ attention and pressuring them to buy the products. Although these children may know nothing about the real value of these products, the desire to get one for themselves, to try out what is suggested in the ad would be a strong point of pressure, one that makes it harder for the parents to say ‘no’ to.
Putting such ads in school grounds will make it hard for the children to decide later on. Flooding their minds with marketing messages that are not that easy to neither analyze nor give meaning to would establish in them a culture of indifference to matters that really mean something to their lives (Goldstein, 212). This approach would harm their decision-making procedures as they grow older, thus jeopardizing the development of their capacity to improve critical thinking.
As a whole, to conclude, the utilization of marketing in school grounds should not be allowed as a strategic matter to be fully utilized by marketers at present. While it may be implicatively successful on their part, it should be considered unethical and must be stopped so as to lessen the hurt and destruction that marketing is imposing on the morals and the mental growth that young children ought to embrace at a young age.
References
Adcock, Dennis; Al Halborg, Caroline Ross. “Introduction”. Marketing: principles and practice (4th ed.). Xavier thomas. p. 15. 2001.
Kardes et al. “Consumer Behavior; 2nd edition”. Cengage Learning, Stamford. 2015.
Goldstein, D.; Lee, Y. “The rise of right-time marketing”. The Journal of Database Marketing & Customer Strategy Management 12 (3): 212–225. 2005.