“How Often Do Your Kids Have Fast Food for Lunch?” Gaining Insights when Marketing a Sensitive Product to a Vulnerable Target Group: An Abstract

Abstract

Evidence from two studies, in which both parents and children were surveyed, leads to new insights on children’s preferences regarding fast food. The research approach tries to handle the trade-off between comparability of results and necessary adaptions of the research instrument to the needs and wants of respondents in three age groups to ensure validity. Moreover, two examples of the implementation of gamification and playfulness in market research targeted at the youngest consumers are given. Findings from an observational study discovered lost potential regarding communication efforts of sales staff, as sellers ignored children in 60% of all observations. Interactions were most of the time focused on parents/caretakers, which highlights the underestimated role of children in the purchasing process. The results also show that the needs and wants of parents and children concerning store experience for children at the point-of-sale differ. While parents and caretakers especially stressed utilitarian aspects such as fast lanes, healthy food, easy order solutions or sanitary standards, kids in contrast put considerably more emphasis on hedonic aspects such as tasty food, entertainment, and playfulness. The originality of the research resides in its qualitative approach since it provides insights into the underlying motivation of children by using games and picking up on children’s creative potential. This study shows that adapting market research to the needs of young consumers can offer true insight that may pay-off in the competitive environment. This research adds to existing literature in the area of children as consumers, by using a combined approach of surveying children and their parents. As doing research with children comes with a lot of challenges, as well as ethical concerns and legal limitations, the key hypothesis is that gamified information presentation improves research outputs and leads to more engaged respondents. A combined research approach with parents and children may prove most fruitful and lead to distinct results.