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e r s i o nBabysitter's Club
Stephen Kline discusses the sordid world of character marketing
In Out of the Garden: Toys and Children's Culture in the Age of TV Marketing (Verso), author Stephen Kline sets out to illustrate a not particularly arguable argument--that the key forces in children's socialization aren't strictly parents and schools but the marketplace. Fortunately, the 400-some pages backing that up illuminate (and rather brilliantly) the complicated history of marketing to children while examining the impact of market forces on children's play. Terribly interesting stuff, particularly Kline's discussion of character goods--the Ninja Turtles dolls, Power Rangers--those with licensing ties to popular television, film, and video game characters.
Due largly to deregulation of children's TV, almost every children's product advertised on TV now has a "personality" associated with it, whether that personality is tied directly to the product (Tony the Tiger, Jolly Green Giant) or licensed from a separate, already established character (Ninja Turtles, Pocahontas). The same strategy that helps sell all kinds of products to adults is even more important with children: personality is, as Kline says, "the best way to differentiate a product without depending on brand-name recognition or the retention of product attributes." Or as the time-honored marketing cliché goes, "personality promotes loyalty," whether that "personality" be Aunt Jemima or the Nike mystique.
Of course, some products are easier to personify than others. It's hard to make a TV hero or a community of cuddly creatures out of broccoli, shoes, sports beverages, etc. As Kline writes:
Only toy makers could (successfully) feature their products as the hero of a TV series. In the case of character toys, the personalities featured in the television series were the products--so their unique abilities, weapons, styles, voices, and identities could be much more clearly defined and communicated than by advertising back-stories.
Furthermore, when kids request their favorite toy, they don't need to remember brand names ("J-E-L-L-O") or product attributes ("air-cushioned heel"), all they have to learn to say is "I want Liono, King of the Thundercats!"
Marketers' emphasis on personality is taken to its rational end with toy-based television (Care Bears, Ninja Turtles, My Little Pony, etc.) and other media. Personality not only plays a greater role in establishing product identity; personality practically becomes the product. The character isn't just trying to sell something else, it's selling itself.
The implications here are many. For one, yeah, the products that sell best via children's television are those that can more easily accommodate personalities. But what's more--and this is something Kline discusses in depth--the rise of character marketing affects how children play. When a kid buys a Nancy Nimrod, she doesn't just get a hunk of plastic and vinyl accessories, she gets specific social roles, rules, and rituals associated with the character's fantasy world.
In observing kids' play, Kline found that they were more likely to follow
rules of right and wrong--rules which are provided by the back stories
from television shows and other programming--when playing with character
toys than they would with non-character toys. Since they are of separate
worlds, G.I. Joe wouldn't fight Transformers and Barbie wouldn't sing
with My Little Ponies. Kline writes: "Such mixtures might be the occasion
for rather elaborate discussions of the possibilities of interaction between
two sets of rules. But they rarely happened." If a rebel kid ever broke
the rules, a playmate would be sure to correct him: "Moto can't fly, he's
a motorcycle."
Increased market segmentation--more and more toys designed exclusively for girls or boys; for blacks or whites or Native Americans, or Asians--discourages kids from playing with those not like themselves. (I'm not going to get into the "PC toys don't sell" argument here. I realize this works both ways--girls want girly toys; companies make what sells, etc. The point here is just that target marketing makes matters worse). Character toys are even more gender-stereotyped than regular toys. Kline found that children playing with character toys were extremely unlikely to play with kids of the other gender--not, he suggests, because they don't like each other but because they don't know how (G.I. Joe can't date My Little Ponies). Boys and girls would find it easier playing together with a large cardboard box than with action figures.
In short, this book is really great. At times frustratingly level-headed,
Kline abstains from blaming business for retarded programming, since business
is business and, above all else, about turning a profit. Yet there's no
forced objectivity here. Kline carefully examines multiple sides of each
issue, providing conflicting arguments as only someone clearly engaged
with and concerned about his subject matter can. Even while arguing for
more government restrictions on business, he's aware of the limits of
regulation, and aware that fixing the mess we're in now requires nothing
short of a whole new system . . . but we'll leave that for another time.
Anyway, I was so fired up after I read the book, I hunted Kline down for an interview. -- Carrie McLaren
Stay Free!: First, about the book: you discuss ways marketing segments
kids by age and gender, but you don't mention race. Why?
Stephen Kline: Well that's a good question, which probably has an
explanation other than academic color blindness. For one thing, when I
looked at toy ads in my study, they often seemed constructed around a
market inclusiveness--Afro-American and Asian-American boys could all
play G.I. Joe, but no girls and no little kids. Ditto for the My Little
Pony or She-Ra ads. Second, when I did play observation studies, I noted
that young kids in mixed play groups don't seem to pay much attention
to race.
That's the opposite of my experience growing up; I played with boys
all the time and never with black kids.
Canada is more multiethnic, perhaps. But what surprises me about the
TV realm of play is that it attempts to create a more inclusive universe
than that which kids experience in their daily lives. In fact, the only
racism (if I can call it that) that I noticed was a very allegorical racism
in many of the TV narratives where the bio-technical character world gets
drawn up as a techno-genetic battleground constructed around opposing
races. This was particularly strong in Japanese animated storytelling,
as other alien species invade, usurp, and infiltrate the defender society.
Even Pound Puppies and Care Bears show vague signs of this theme of "us
against the evil invaders."
It's a little politically problematic to state this in an era of representational political ideas--where everyone is saying we need more feminist fashion dolls or Afro-American superheroes--but I don't think the color of the doll matters. Lego, Fisher-Price and Play Mobil are happy to paint their toys if it helps to sell the play sets. More important is whether kids play together or not. If they are not playing together they are not establishing the patterns of communication . . . ultimately, this kind of racism is more deeply rooted in our culture, it's structural and it's everywhere and not really being transformed by marketing.
Yeah, but then how is that really any different from sexism?
It's not, but what I noticed is that the marketers, by targeting boys
and girls separately, have created a divisive play world, and kids recognize
it as such. The targeting strategy has influenced kids' concept of the
toy and play. We spent a lot of time talking to kids about whether and
what you could play with members of the other sex (we never talked to
them about race stuff), and they were pretty clear that it was not a matter
of limitations or inherent differences but of preferences, fun. If girls
liked to play Morphin Power Rangers and knew all about what that game
involved--watched the show, etc.--then they were welcome. If boys liked
playing dolls, then come on down to Barbie land. But generally the stereotypes
they held of each other were mapped pretty rigidly... I think in Canadian
kids' culture, gender play preferences and styles are more clearly defined
for the very young (around six years). I suspect that schools and street
teach racism, however, and not the marketplace and TV, which is much more
focused on gender divisions.
Has there been more research about gender than race or class? It
seems like it'd be in the industry's interest to know more about marketing
to, for example, African-Americans since African Americans make up a disproportiately
larger percent of lower classes, and lower classes spend more on toys.
I agree, but this is complex in that a higher percent of their disposable
income is spent on toys, but this may not account for decisions made about
the heavily promoted toys. Many toys are gifts--from grandparents, etc.,
so it's hard to say how such data would get used. (Maybe it'd be used
more by merchandisers to determine what to stock than by ad designers.)
There is, of course, proprietary research that I never get to see. What
the toy companies know about racial differences in purchase and play patterns
is not something that gets published.
Yeah, you mention in Out of the Garden how some of the most significant
advances in child psychology are made by marketing researchers. I wonder
if much attention has been given to considering the long-term effects
of this trend.
Yes, a central problem in the discourses of science and criticism
concerns who gets funding. My complaints are two-fold here. One, most
psychological research is too narrowly focused on education, on learning
processes which are cognitive rather than social and emotional. That means
we don't know very much about kids' culture, or their social and emotional
normal development, but we know a huge amount about how they learn conservation,
numbers, how to read, etc. The exception here is violence and TV, which
has been funded out of guilt and fear.
The second issue is that it was left to the marketing researchers to rectify this bias in the academic discussion of childhood, and they did this with gusto, because understanding kids' culture is essential to marketing. For example, Nintendo U.S. has a fantastic research effort where they run at least 1500 kids a week through this groovy research center. How am I to compete with them in understanding what's behind kids' fascinations with Doom and Mortal Kombat? Fisher-Price/Mattel undertook a global cultural research project to find how various toys are suited to different cultural contexts, but try and get hold of world sales of Lego sets by theme or some of the evidence about cultural differences in play or attitudes of parents . . . well, you can't, because it's private data--"can't give you that for reasons of competitive advantage." So in fact some very important observations about the fate of childhood in the increasingly globalized consumer culture are simply not open to examination and debate!
In the book when you mentioned The Child and how that proprietary
information was eventually disclosed to the public. How did that come
to pass?
SK: I think The Child was subpoenaed in an FCC or FTC hearing
on children's advertising. This is one of the costs of deregulation
because without policy units holding hearings we would know very little
about marketing research.
Any idea why Toys 'R' Us uses Down's syndrome kids in their ads?
Toys R Us advertises to parents and not to kids.
You suggest that to make any substantial improvements in the children's
culture industries, we need a whole new framework for developing them;
business isn't going to do it. But how? Government subsidies? Regulation?
Don't get me started on the V-chip and technological regulation versus
parenting. I am actually launching a campaign to get people to convert
the V-chip to an A-chip--by setting it to exclude all unrated programs,
the advertising magically disappears from your screen! In Canada we had
a Supreme Court ruling which said that it was legitimate to protect children
with legislation because they are a special vulnerable class of consumer,
and that is fine by me. Canada also has gratuitous violence legislation
which, of course, doesn't work because it doesn't apply to cable or satellite
U.S. transmissions. I think countries like Canada, Europe, and Asia are
wimping out on this issue but cultural regulation will come back to haunt
us. In the meanwhile I have another concern, which is that right-wing
ideologues have hijacked the family values agenda, leaving the liberal
laissez-faire confusion the only moral alternative.
In your book you say there's no commercial impetus to make kids'
programming other than animated fiction. Could you explain that a bit?
Producing good kids' TV drama is expensive, and with satellite and cable
fragmentation of the market and defunding of state children's broadcasting
who are positioned to make it (BBC, ABC mainly) means that the animated
tie-in will still dominate children's TV.
You mentioned earlier that you've been studying video games the past
couple of years. What sort of research have you done? Since you explore
how fantasy/escape has served an increasingly important fuction in animated
TV shows, I'm wondering what sort of connection that could have with the
rise of video games.
Right now I think a major difference is that video games are very effective
technologies for the alteration of the affective state of the player--more
so than television and toys are. I have been tracking video games' development
and marketing as well as reasons kids want to play them, and the emotional
consequences of playing them. My broad new thesis: one, promotional hype
has positioned video games as potentially educational (which helps lessen
parental guilt at these high price points), and two, kids don't play them
for learning but for the buzz--which is evident from watching any Sega
TV ad. This is a rather cynical stance but arguable.
Has the fantasy defense--"obviously it's not real"--helped get makers
of violent video games off the hook in the same way it's accommodated
children's TV? What about other strategies? I know Nintendo has used comarketing
deals with Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, McDonald's, to gain credibility
with the family values lobby.
Yeah, and it's true--kids don't play reality games; it's bad enough for
most of them that they have to live in it. That is why the impulse to
ban them because they are violent is somewhat misguided because, like
the case made against TV, kids do know they are not real. I suspect we
need to fundamentally rethink this reality/fantasy distinction.
Do you mean that whether something is fantasy or reality isn't the
issue? Or that there's something wrong with the the way fantasy and reality
are defined, as polar opposites?
Both. Play is paradoxical: it subsumes both a connection to reality and
imagination by definition. . . . Video game violence is not real violence,
but it is an intense simulation of personal conflict. We should think
about whether that is something worth encouraging our children to do on
a regular basis with high degrees of engagement. I want to get out of
the situation of having to prove something is definitely harmful before
we can criticize it.
How does character factor into video game marketing? Pac Man and Mario
seem to have really benefited from having a "personality." Do video games
use personalities in the same way that TV characters or macaroni do? It
seems to me that if interactivity were as important to games as their
advocates claim, that games wouldn't have to rely on preset characters
and narratives to be successful. Plus the video game brands [Nintendo,
Sega, Sony] are sort of "personalities."
A complex issue, but I think, unlike toys, video games do not rely on
character to promote children's interest but a kind of fantasy which is
character-situation-challenge-oriented. In other words, video games have
created a new genre of narrativity that we don't fully understand yet.
But characters help popularize them, even if they're not very important
to the affective experience, like a bare-breasted Jenny McCarthy isn't
important to listening to surf music.
Yes, but I guess I am pretty blasé about this 'cause it is simply
the standard way you strategize in promotional marketing. Not much new
really. So the whole world is being turned into a supermarket--yawn--so
there are no boundaries between the cultural and commercial spheres--yawn
yawn--so most of our public spaces are viewed as opportunities for marketing
messages--snooze . . . I guess I sometimes get tired of trying to point
out that there are other visions of society than this one!
Ok, just one more question. Which is easier to spinoff? TV shows/movies
based on video games or vice versa?
That's a good question which I hope to gain some insight into. If I do,
of course, I will be too wealthy to appear in any magazines except Vanity
Fair and People.
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