Marketing of snacks is a very complex mechanism which is specifically constructed to influence children's consumer choice and behavior. The effects of advertising can be seen on multiple levels affecting children's knowledge of brands, consumer attitudes, and eating behavior. Investigating the effect of children’s influence on parental decision making is essential to marketers who need to assess the performance of their communications and devise new marketing strategies for the future. This research proposes to identify what factors influences parents in their purchase decision for snacks and what roles children play in the parental purchase decisions for snacks. Furthermore the research concentrates on processed snacks in order to determine the most prominent factors in the Thai food market and thus propose appropriate information for marketers based on empirical research collected. This book makes important contributions to the family respectively parental decision making research and it should serve as a framework to the future research in the area of children's influence.

Text Sample: Chapter 2.5.2, Environmental influences: The environment of the children can be defined as the child’s own peers outside the family. The children’s friends or who they are with during their leisure time are characterized as environment. The environment plays a key role in molding many of a child’s characteristics. A person can be changed by his/her environment no matter what he/she inherits from parents. Nowadays the traditional eating environment of the family, which is the dining table, is replaced by other environments, such as the bedroom or the living room in which there is a television. ‘In these environments, children are likely to be surrounded by influences promoting materialistic attitudes expressed through the use of strategies aimed at parents’. Societal Influence: Nowadays, media plays an important role especially on children’s behavior. Advertisements targeting children basically have raised ethical concerns. The frequency with which a child sees pictures on television, determines if a children accepts the pictures as real or not. Societal influences are persuasive in pushing families to buy food advertised on television. Theories related to Children’s Influence on Parental Decisions: Consumer Socialization: The consumer socialization theory can be described as the process by which children acquire the skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary to function as consumers. Socialization generally refers to the process in which people learn the skills, knowledge, values, motives and roles of the groups to which they belong or the communities in which they live. Social agents and other structural variables are instrumental in shaping an individual’s attitudes and behaviours. Consumer socialization is one leading theory in studying children’s influence on family consumption decisions. This theory views children as a ‘socializee’ and parents as a major socialization agent to specify the socializer vs. socializee relations between children and parents. During the process of consumer socialization, children acquire skills and attitudes toward the market place. It might be that in this process the child’s behavior will be rewarded or punished by the parents.

• Parental Decision Making

• Bangkok

• Thailand

• Snacks

• Food Industry

• Thai Parents

• Thai study

Andreas Senkbeil, born in 1978, has studied Industrial Engineering and Management specializing in Innovation Management and holds a Master in Business Administration. He received Departmental Honors from the School of Business and Technology at Webster University, Campus in Thailand. He recently returned from Thailand to work for one of Germany’s leading companies in the Banking and Insurance Industry.