The Influence of Packaging, Advertising, Peers and Pester Power
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Journal of Arts & Social Sciences Vol 2, Issue 1, 1-13 (2018) Children’s Ownership Intention towards Licensed Character Products: The Influence of Packaging, Advertising, Peers and Pester Power Nur Adibah Md Lazim Zuraidah Sulaiman *Thoo Ai Chin Adaviah Mas’od Farrah Merlinda Muharam Faculty of Management, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Malaysia Johor Bahru, Malaysia. Email: [email protected], [email protected] [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ___________________________________________________________________________ Abstract The purpose of this study is to investigate children’s ownership intention towards licensed character products. Licensed character products are products or merchandise that are associated with well- known and licensed brands such as Disney, Warner Brothers, Nickelodeon, Sesame Street and many others. In Malaysia, popular brands of licensed character products include Upin and Ipin, BoboiBoy and Puteri, among others. Two hundred and seventy-seven primary school students from year two and year three participated in this research. The collected data was analysed using Partial Least Squares (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS version 3.2.3. The findings revealed that packaging, social influence (peers) and pester power positively influence children’s ownership intention towards licensed character products, however, media (advertising) does not have a significant influence. The final section of this paper outlines potential recommendations for business. Key words: Ownership Intention, Licensed Character Products, Packaging, Advertising, Peers and Pester Power * Corresponding author ___________________________________________________________________________ Introduction Many companies rely on characters to create awareness, for positioning their products, to attract customers and to expand their market. A good character design can build a strong identity for a company in order to remain competitive and produce long-term revenue. There are hundreds of characters that have been created by companies for marketing purposes (Garretson and Burton, 2005). Companies choose these characters based on how often they appear in movies, television programs, commercial breaks and the common existence of items marketed to this target group. A licensed character product is different from a brand character; a licensed character can come in many different forms, such as live action (e.g. Avatar) or animated (e.g. Naruto). The idea of endowing non-human objects or animals with human characteristics is called anthropomorphism (Epley, Waytz, and Cacioppo, 2007; Mitchell, Thompson, and Miles, 1997). The researcher found that the use of licensed characters is an effective marketing strategy, where the company places a character image on their packaging, in their advertisements or even uses one as their company logo. The objectives of this research are: 1. To identify the relationship between the independent variables (packaging, advertising, peers and pester power) and children’s ownership intention towards licensed character products 1 Journal of Arts & Social Sciences Vol 2, Issue 1, 1-13 (2018) 2. To recognise the most important factor that influences children’s ownership intention towards licensed character products Figure 1: Conceptual Framework Literature Review Licensed Character Products A character is defined as any symbol, figure or letter of an alphabet that is used in printing, writing, or the traits of someone’s behaviour and personality (Character, 2015). Licensing is the process of legally protecting (via trademark or copyright) that property, which can be a name, likeness, character, logo, signature, graphic, or a combination of several forms of these elements, to place on the product or another product line (White, 1990, p.5). During the past decade, character and entertainment licensing has been a huge success and has generated billions of dollars in revenue each year. Thus, this has become one of the most profitable types of licensing (Raugust, 1995, p.21). Names such as Warner Brothers, Disney, Nickelodeon and Fox are some of the major players in character and entertainment licensing. Les’ Copaque (2014) found that licensing their characters creates more brand awareness and has been successful in promoting some of Malaysia’s most popular animated series to the international stage. During 1999, when McDonald’s collaborated with Hello Kitty, reports indicated that customers were mostly interested in the Hello Kitty special edition dolls and not the McDonald’s products. Packaging Packaging acts as a communication tool and provides consumers with product information during the buying process. Increasing competitive advantages makes packaging one of the most important marketing tools to attract and create brand recognition for potential customers. Children respond to products sometimes not because they really need them, but because they are fun. They are easily attracted to nice-looking packaging (Geoperwic and Beharrell, 1994; Ogba and Johnson, 2010). According to Ning (2015), the children commodity packaging colour should be pure and clear. This is because, children level of knowledge is limited; it’s hard for them to understand complex information. For children, when looking at the certain thing, their first impression of human visual sense is colour which are more straight forward and most intuitive. Although children’s is active and lively character, but their attention is not easy to focus; only attractive packaging can capture their attention. At the same time, cartoon character that portray on packaging also cause the interest to children (Ning, 2015). Previous studies suggest that children are more prefer to select foods when the packages show familiar cartoon characters (Jayne, 2009; Levin and Levin, 2010; Roberto, Baik, Harris, and Brownell, 2010). Hill and Tilley (2002) claimed that children have a justifiable preference for cereal when they identified the character portrayed on the front of their favourite cereal box. 2 Journal of Arts & Social Sciences Vol 2, Issue 1, 1-13 (2018) H1: There is a relationship between packaging and children’s ownership intention towards licensed character products. Media Influence (Advertising) Media includes a wide range of modern communication, such as video, radio, advertising, newspaper, television, cinema, music, computer games, photography and the internet. It’s often called ‘mass media’ when it reaches large audiences. Advertising is defined as paid information that contains a non-personal message and description about the product, service or ideas by an identified sponsor through various media (Datta, 2008; Kotler et al., 2010). According Boyland and Halford (2013) television is one of the first medium that offer commercial food promotion to children. The report from UK broadcast regular shows television is media device that most missed by children (Ofcom, 2014). Despite there are availability of other medium, television still the media activity children would prefer to watch with an average of 14.6 hours every week compared to any other type of media (Ofcom, 2014). Children are more easily attracted to advertisements that include child models, animals, cartoon characters and celebrities (Ross et al., 1984; Blosser and Roberts, 1985; Rolandelli, 1989; Collins, 1990; Maher et al., 2006). Several studies have found that children perceived the advertisement as positive and more trustworthy when advertiser using familiar characters (Garretson and Niedrich, 2004; Castonguay, Kunkel, Wright and Duff, 2013). They also prefer to taste food that advertise with popular characters relatively to same food advertised without characters in the promotion (Roberto, Baik, Harris and Brownell, 2010; Kotler, Schiffman and Hanson, 2012). Familiar characters tend to influence children perceptions of advertised product (Lapierre, Vaala and Linebarger, 2011). H2: There is a relationship between media influence (advertising) and children’s ownership intention towards licensed character products. Social Influence (Peers) Rashotte (2011) defined social influence as a change in an individual’s mindset, feelings and attitude that arises from the interaction between one individual or group and another. Peers refer to contemporaries of a similar age and social circle – these include friends, playmates, classmates, team members and co-workers. Niu (2013) state that peers influence has found to significantly affect purchase behaviour and it continuously reinforced by individual peer group. The stronger the bond and identification with peers, the more influences on peer communication (Wang, Yu and Wei, 2012). Children want something that makes them feel special and products that they and their friends think are ‘cool’. Children possess behaviours of jealously, revenge and controversy (Camstock and Strzyzewkis, 1990; Hameed et al., 2014). They also fear of being laugh by friends if not follow current trend. Moreover, studies by Moore and Bowman (2006) found that individuals using their peers as a benchmark of success with desire to have an equal amount of material goods as their friends. Peers perform an important function in affecting children’s preferences for products, because children are more likely to want to have licensed character products if their peers own them as well (Kline, 1993; Sengheu, 2001). H3: There is a relationship between social influence (peers) and children’s ownership intention towards licensed character products. Pester Power Pester power refers to the influence