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.