“Toy-Based Programming and Childrens Knowledge of Products”
If you thought that the research paper about Transformers that I shared earlier this week is the only such study out there then you’re going to find this 1988 paper a bit of a surprise. Written by W. Jeffrey Burroughs and John Ryan, Toy-Based Programming and Childrens Knowledge of Products is a six-page paper that sets out to demonstrate how effective cartoons can be as a way of educating kids about toylines.
Congratulations, Hasbro! Your marketing efforts with the Transformers line in the eighties was a success . . . and here is the academic paper to prove it!
“The results support the conclusion that toy-based programming is an effective tool in imparting knowledge about the toy products associated with the programs. Heavy viewers were able to name more of the toys and were more familiar with the attributes of the characters that are based on the scripts of the programs. Toy based programming accomplishes the goal of creating: product familiarity in the group of consumers studied.”
Why this is seen as a negative thing is something I continue to not understand. Children are not sheep who can be brainwashed, and getting upset about a toymaker using marketing tools to grow their brand strikes me as amazingly silly. Do we get upset when a movie like The Avengers gets so much of a marketing push that we can’t help but run into references to the film?
Read the paper if you’re at all interested in the subject.
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