A Study on Children’s Agency in the Marketing to Children During the 1960s

Abstract

To elucidate one aspect of the significant emergence of “children as consumers” in Japan during the 1960s, this paper explored children’s agency within marketing to children. This paper analysed the ethical children’s marketing campaign conducted by Citizen Watch Co., Ltd. between 1963 to 1965. The author, in examining the position of children within this initiative, categorised this campaign into two activities and analysed the development of the perspective on children within each activity.

In the preface, the author reviewed research on children as consumers in Japan, explaining the purpose and significance of this paper and the sources examined. In the second section, the author revealed that this child-focused marketing campaign was underpinned by a move to incorporate the populous junior high school age group into the watch market. In the third section, the author explored that children were positioned as “consultants” who provided opinions to businesses based on their research, and it became clear that children were regarded as fully-fledged individuals on equal standing with adults in this campaign. In the fourth section, the author examined that children were perceived as building connections with peers across school and community boundaries.

The last section summarizes the discussion and provides new insights into children as consumers in Japan during the 1960s. The author clarified that these two types of children’s agency had been constructed within this campaign. The author also indicated that children’s agency within this campaign had limitations in that children’s agency was not positioned as challenging corporations or consumer society. Moreover, it became clear that the strategy of expecting children as consumers, to transcend the educational view of childhood centered on schools also ultimately failed.