Young consumers' advertising attributions, irrational behaviour and new directions for social marketing

Food marketing has undergone profound changes during the past 30 years, shifting from television to digital advertising with more aggressive outreach activities aimed at children. Current debate about children’s exposure to food advertising involves negative rhetoric as children are expected to be impressionable; this is exacerbated by the mixed evidence regarding children’s application of their advertising knowledge when choosing foods. While this may be due to young consumers’ asserted inability to
resist advertising, our knowledge about the relationship between children’s advertising attributions (informative vs persuasion/selling) and consumer behaviour remains
limited. For example, there is no conceptual explanation of how confounding variables (taste, curiosity, or social appeals) impact on behaviour even when consumers are fully aware of commercial bias. Whether advertising itself contributes to the development of
informative and persuasive attributions is also poorly conceptualised. To address the above-mentioned gaps a new conceptual framework was developed to provide new insights.