Ethics of Marketing to Children
Business on this days is highly concentrated towards teens and young ages. For instance, the markets produce the products that are based on child level, which attracts thousands and millions of young consumers and makes a great profit. However, many people are tackling about the facts that targeting the young ages is not ethical, furthermore, considered as an abuse.
To provide the incident of a huge international company, McDonald's Happy Meals for children with toys has come under attack. San Francisco is one of the cities that has voted to ban selling toys with fast food for children that exceed certain levels of salt, fat, calories and sugar. McDonald's was accused of deceptive marketing practices to children over the lure of toys as an inducement to buy Happy Meals. To round up the facts from the article, they attracted and allured the young ages by providing a small handy toy, which put the kids in the risk of absorbing unhealthy foods that are crucial during their age. Because of the case in McDonald's, targeting the younger ages is being considered as an unethical business management.
However, in my opinion, targeting kids as a consumer should not be considered as a child abuse as well as unethical policy. The reason is because kids are no different than grown up men, women, grandparents, etc; they are all same consumers. If the people restricts McDonald's to provide a toy in Happy Meals, then there will be less customers, which leads to various problems, such as unemployment due to the collapse of the company, and economic failure in the US because McDonald's is one of the most ongoing and outstanding US markets that is internationally famous.
To conclude, I believe the people, either if they are the parents of the kids or other competing companies, should not restrict what other companies are planning about targeting young ages because kids are also one of the customers and they bring a tremendous benefits to economy.
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