Editorial

Citation

Brian Young, D. (2007), "Editorial", Young Consumers, Vol. 8 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/yc.2007.32108caa.001

Editorial

Volume 8 Number 3 and we’re now well into the 2007 volume of Young Consumers with the livery of Emerald Group Publishing. This quarter we have four academic papers and three practitioner contributions.

Our regular contribution from Martin Lindstrom looks at how kids communicate and construct their own version of your brands and distribute your ads using their sophistication with the internet. Who’s leading who? This is the sort of insight for executives that should frame your communication strategy with the youth of today

Warwick Cairns has given us an immensely readable piece on children who seem to be growing so much older these days. But it isn’t that simple. It’s types of kids and types of parents that matter and Warwick offers us – with pictures – an insightful and razor-sharp set of categories. What does “pushy progressive” mean to you? Find out inside.

Finally there’s our new regular column from the Global Advertising Lawyer’s Alliance (GALA). Last quarter was China and this time it’s Poland. I’m choosing these carefully as examples of different types of emerging and changing societies and economies. Ewa Skrzydlo-Tefelska and her colleagues explain how with Polish regulations the aim of this legislative process was harmonization of Polish law with the EU legal standards.

Turning now to the academic papers, although they differ a lot in length I felt that the longer ones should stay without too much savage editing in order to justice to the content. Norgaard and her colleagues look at family decision making about foods with a large sample of both parents and children. Models of the decision making process are shown and the conclusions are that although there can be disagreement, decisions are worked through jointly.

More on food from Page and Brewster but this time it’s TV commercials. Some of you will know that there has been a lot of work done in this area, but these authors bring it bang up to date and also look at the promotional strategies (including some interesting observations about websites) and attention elements in the commercials – not just what is advertised but how it is advertised.

Next there is a paper from Marshall again looking at decision making within the family. Using a large sample he offers strong evidence that the acquisition of information specific to a purchase domain, which increases an individual’s knowledge, will add influence to that individual in a group decision situation – in the particular case of internet browsing and teenage sons within the family.

Finally Hogan has another paper – this time looking at trust in the toy industry. The methodology is valuable as he uses qualitative analysis on interview data from senior executives in the industry. The emergent themes of benevolence, integrity, commitment and satisfaction are discussed.

These four papers all explore different cultures and further confirms that we are getting international contributions from our authors as the papers from academics in last quarter’s issue were all from different countries. But, as with all journals, we would like to attract high-quality submissions, and you the reader can help. If your colleagues are doing research or have something to say, either empirical or theoretical, or have executive insights from your own roles in industry and business, then spread the word. I, my colleagues on the Editorial Advisory Board and our team at Emerald will be doing what we can by taking the journal to conferences worldwide and making sure that everyone knows about it and what it stands for. Our editorial policy is to encourage this exciting synergy between practitioner experience and academic research and also to spread our net as wide as possible to include all kinds of work in many different areas concerning child and youth consumption practices.

Dr Brian YoungEditor