An investigation of relationship among socialization agents, pester power and parental purchasing behavior in the process of children's consumer socialization

During consumer socialization process young people acquire skills, knowledge and attitudes that they will use while shopping. This process contains individual factors, socialization agents, learning models and behaviors that occur as a result of those. Consumer socialization in young people takes place after they start interacting with socializing agents; family members, peers, and mass media in different social settings. The most effective mediators in this process are considered as socializing agents. Children while becoming consumers acquire skills and attitudes about consumption through their parents. Hereof parents are acting as an effective tool in determining consumption behaviors of their children; although family members' purchasing behavior is also under the influence of their children. Therefore, consumer socialization process has to be examined with parental styles in order to understand attitudes and behaviors of parents who are actively participating in the process. Studies observing parental styles show that most of the consumption patterns are acquired in early stages of life as they are resulted from the interactions that took place between children and mothers. Hence, compared to the other family members mothers are more likely to adopt the active parental roles. However, mass media is also as effective as families in socializing process of children. Thanks to the programs and advertisements broadcasted in the mass media, children are able to learn more about consumption behavior each and every day. Food advertisements especially the ones targeting children play an important role in consumer behavior. Unfortunately, latest food and beverage marketing trends show that advertisements targeting children mostly feature high-calorie, low-nutrition food products. They seem to influence children, particularly the ones aged between two to eleven since cognitive skills which are essential to understand the persuasive purpose of television and online advertising are not developed until the age of twelve. Under the influence of food advertisements children start nagging their parents into buying junk food (high-calorie foods with low-nutritional value such as snacks) as they do not have direct purchasing power. That's why it is assumed that how families mediate media influence, respond the pressure exerted by their children and their purchase demands will vary according to the parenting styles. In this study, the role of media and the parenting styles in the pester power which is developed by children for junk food were investigated by relating to parental mediation. In addition, the effect of pester power on parental purchasing behavior was determined. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods were applied for this research. The qualitative research design included in-depth interviews held with 20 mothers of children ages five-eight. The qualitative research design included a survey aimed at 360 mothers with different demographic characteristics. The analyses are composed of descriptive analyses, univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA), correlation analysis and simple linear regression analysis. Results of the study show that; two types of media mediation style that have identified in literature so far; active and restrictive mediation styles will differ according to the parenting styles. The parental styles can be determined in four categories in line with nurturing and authoritarianism levels of the parents. Mothers with high nurturing levels (democratic and permissive) usually talk to their children about media content and advertisements while the ones with low nurturing levels (authoritarian and negligent) do not. Democratic, authoritarian and permissive mothers tend to put more restrictions about media content compared to the negligent ones. Parents who actively mediate will prefer to talk and discuss about media contents and advertisements whereas the ones who mediate in a restrictive way will prefer controlling and limiting. As a result, both methods are found to reduce pester power which is also related to parenting styles. It can be said that mothers with low authority were more suppressed by their children than the authoritarians. Finally, it was determined that the pester power of child has an impact on parental purchasing behavior.