Selling Candy To Kids
Young children––even infants––are every company’s future market. Using clothing and toys, spokescharacters and cartoon tie-ins, food companies have long embedded their brand names and logos into the brains and everyday worlds of children. Beyond selling a product, these strategies link food to play, reward, identity, and fun. Pairing food with cartoon characters, toys, and familiar symbols creates positive associations that may shape food preferences, brand recognition, and brand loyalty for decades.
These techniques are especially powerful in early childhood when children have difficulty differentiating between facts and persuasive marketing. With practices that prioritize profit over public health, food marketing to children has contributed to both the obesity epidemic and the tidal wave of chronic illness that we face in the United States today.
Video credit and creation by Common Sense Education
The Power of Packaging
Cartoon characters are cleverly used to lure your kids
Marketing with Merch
Brand names sneak into toys, clothes, everywhere
Screens that Sell
Placement in TV, Movies, Smartphones
Digital Dangers
Marketers follow kids everywhere
Marketing In Schools
How companies have capitalized on captive audiences in schools
Targeted Marketing
How food companies disproportionately target Black and Latino youths
Advertising Healthy Foods
Companies that make healthy eating cool
Undermining Children's Health
The link between food marketing, what kids eat, and their long-term health.
Global Action,
US Inaction
The Path Forward
Selling Candy to Kids was developed by Michael F. Jacobson and Haley Benbow, with assistance from Danielle Brodsky.
