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Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association (October 2007) “as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large” thus the bottom line thrust of marketing is to meet a need. While some argue that marketing creates a need and makes people buy what they do not want to, my question really is can a person be made to buy what they do not want? Following Piaget (1970)’s cognitive development theory, we find that children first develop their motor-sensory skills and their reasoning and discernment skills later. Thus at ages of up to 12, most children find it difficult to discern between real and unreal as such, they tend to believe that most advertising as real. Changing demographics which have skewed traditional household patterns has meant that children spend more time with television these days and have such become more susceptible to television advertising as television has emerged as the new babysitter (Solomon et al, 2010).
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