Consumer socialisation

Children have to acquire appropriate consumer-related skills, behaviour ori entations, knowledge, and attitudes to participate effectively in the marke tplace of adults. Preadult consumer socialisation is also necessary for chi ldren to deal with practical problems in their childhood market. Research o n consumer socialisation has been carried out mainly from a psychological p erspective or a marketing perspective. Both approaches have inherent faults in terms of their ability to provide a full picture of children's consumer socialisation, particularly with respect to children's cultural milieu. Wi thin this paper we sketch an integration of these perspectives that we beli eve addresses some of their shortcomings. At the core of our "scaffolding" approach are three consumption-related concepts that provide children with a mental scaffold for interpreting consumption experiences, namely, ownersh ip, money as a medium of exchange, and price. These concepts, once grasped, provide the mental scaffold for integrating consumption experience and for negotiating its meaning in a culturally appropriate and acceptable way. Th ese scaffolding blocks are discussed and, to show how they underpin and sup port children's consumer socialisation, we then examine the role of the fam ily as a primary context for children's consumer socialisation. Within both these sections we examine the cross-cultural research that informs our kno wledge of the universality or otherwise of the research findings.