| dc.description.abstract | As the role of children in families is growing, and their consumption ability is boosted, the children’s spending is drawing much attention for primary markets, future markets, and important influencers. This makes it critical to explore children’s consumer behavior, to understand how a child becomes a consumer via the socialization process.
This study, based on the perspective of consumer socialization, examines the impact of geographical locations and family communication patterns on children’s consumption patterns. Geographical locations have categorized into urban and rural areas, and family communication patterns according to their socio-oriented and concept-oriented dimensions, including laissez-faire, protective, pluralistic, and consensual types. The discussed consumption patterns are broken down into consumption aspirations, brand knowledge, saving values, and spending values.
240 children were chosen from Taipei, Ilan, and Hualien to participate in the survey. The results indicate that their geographical location is correlated with a child’s consumption patterns, while there is some association between family communication patterns and consumption patterns. According to the analysis methodologies, the relationship between geographical location and a child’s saving values is significant, while location is only partially correlated with consumption aspirations, brand knowledge, and spending values. Furthermore, family communication patterns are only partially correlated with a child’s consumption aspirations and saving values, while there is no difference in brand knowledge and spending values. This study clearly indicates that urban children have a much higher savings rate than rural children, and more concept-oriented children prefer to save their money in the bank than do socio-oriented children.
All these discoveries are expected to have implications for marketers, government authorities, and educators concerned with the development of children’s consumer behaviors. | en_US |