Branded From Birth

Pattie’s recent mention of the latest marketing tendril (tentacle?) to snake outward from Disney’s “Princesses” franchise struck a nerve with me. You see, I’m going to become a dad myself this fall, and even though I’m going to be spending the next few years learning baby talk and then trying to transition that into what I hope will become a solid and fluent grasp of English for my child, I’ve already been mentally filing away “lesson plans,” for lack of a better way to put it, for later, once we’ve (hopefully) established the roots of a command of English. One of the topics burning a hole in the back of my brain is trying to create some sense of awareness of marketing, and a sense of discipline and skepticism about it.

I doubt I’ll have much luck anytime before age 10 or so, of course. I remember what I was like as a kid (and what I’m like now, too, being essentially a big kid, depending on who you ask). I was four when I saw Star Wars for the first time, and five when the figures hit the stores. Oh yeah, baby. I was all over that. My young life (and, therefore, my parents’ budget) hinged on the availability of plastic wookiees and droids. (If I’m to be quite honest, my plastic-wookiee-and-droid lust didn’t abate until after I’d gotten a couple of handfuls of Episode III figures.) I have no doubt my kid’s going to be the same.

But something to keep in mind about my formative years is that the Star Wars marketing story was a bolt-from-the-blue success that nobody expected; certainly not 20th Century Fox, which allowed Lucas to hang on to the merchandising rights for himself, as they figured there was no value in it for them. These days, stuff isn’t just marketed heavily toward children – it’s marketed downright insidiously. While shopping for baby bedding a few weeks back, I snuck a glance at toys aimed more at toddlers – well over a year before I’m even going to need to be thinking about such things – and I was stunned. There have been toy cash registers since I was a wee tot myself, but not with slots to swipe a big plastic credit card. And not just any big plastic credit card, but a plastic credit card with the official Visa logo on it.

Oh, I don’t. Even. Think so.

I had already been looking at the world in a new light, having just recently found out that we’re expecting a boy, and I was already re-examining things like cartoons and children’s programming (and their various and sundry tie-ins) with a new, more skeptical eye. I’ve seen my niece’s collection of Disney princess-related gear grow steadily too, and I’m becoming aware that I’m going to be fighting the opposite number of that trend – one fueled more by testosterone than frills and fantasy. I don’t want to raise my child to be naive, but I don’t want him to be a bully either. There’s got to be a balance. But let me stray a little bit closer to the original point.

It seems that the folks marketing toward kids are sometimes ignoring the ramifications of their message in favor of getting their “brand” out there. When that brand-awareness-from-birth practice grows to include credit cards, I lose track of how many mental alarm bells go off. If you were standing next to me right now, you could catch a glint of red emergency “bubble lights” shining through my ears. Don’t get me wrong, credit cards are tools like any other, capable of helping one in a tight spot, and just as capable of being misused. But the idea that the major credit card vendors are stamping their official logos on toys, and sponsoring educational initiatives on money, aimed at the grade school crowd, the phrase “fox guarding the henhouse” springs instantly to mind, even with all of the acclaim that these efforts have won. It strikes me as being almost as laughable as the Philip Morris company’s bluster about sponsoring anti-smoking education – because all you have to do is watch an hour or so of television to see that Visa and others of their ilk are flying in the face of their own “lessons,” with one recent TV ad campaign – set to the tune of Petula Clark’s “Downtown” – all but coming right out and saying that if you’re feeling just a little blue, get out there and run up that credit card balance. Buy stuff. Feel better.

At least the tobacco companies are barred from getting their counter-education onto the public airwaves.

Even though I know I’m probably a good three years early on this, I guess my question is, to any other parents out there, how do you fight this? Everyone from major credit card vendors to fast food restaurants have already figured out how to get their names and their logos and their products under kids’ noses at school, when we can’t be there to point out the alternatives or the downsides. College age kids are having credit cards pushed to them as soon as they’re on campus, if not before.

I realize that schools seem to be under-funded just about everywhere, making these sponsorships a necessary evil to some districts. And I’m not asking public schools to shoulder the entire burden of teaching fiscal responsibility (here’s an article that makes several good cases against that, in the context of the modern American public school classroom). The American way of life shouldn’t be mom, baseball, apple pie, and consumer debt in one big package – and we shouldn’t be relying on the schools to get that message across when they’ve fallen into the same trap of debt that the rest of us have at one time or another.

Sure, we can ask for policy reforms on this issue, but it doesn’t absolve us of the need to start doing the work at home. This is a case where it looks like we’ll have to reform ourselves to set a better example for our own children.