What is KGOY?
It is a new marketing term used by marketers and advertises to describe the influence of young children these days on family’s purchasing decisions and their brand knowledge.
What is means?
Socially, what it means is that kids are getting more sophisticated in their choices, more mature and eager to grow up – become teenagers – thus blurring the lines of childhood.
What parents should know?
KGOY is a profitable phenomenon for marketers to children and the one they would obviously promote. Hence most advertising, TV programming to children show older ‘cool’. The ‘cool’ kids are the ones who dress like, accessorize, talk like and use products like the children/ teenagers older than their own age.
What it does to kids’ preferences is make kids grow out of their toys, fashion, diet preferences more quickly. And this gives opportunity to marketers to promote new products every year or two to the same target audience and make money by selling different things quickly to the same group and the same thing to different groups – younger kids, third world countries and those who catch up on a trend when it is about to fade – laggards.
What parents should do?
- Stay calm – know that it’s not just your kid. Ease, don’t add to the tension.
- Maintain free communication – listen to them. They may be struggling too. Especially when the choice is between; to fit in or be sensible?
- Educate your child – help her/him understand what’s happening, why? You’d find plenty of leads through our mindfully curated articles on this website, written for kids/teens. Here’s how we explain KGOY to kids. Once you have the leads, you can do your focused search and research on topics of relevance to you/ your child.
- Help your child discover and pursue her/his interests. Empty mind is marketers’ soft target.
- Finally, keep your sense of humor. Toughest barriers fall and problems can be solved with a dash of humor. Getting serious about serious matters leads to serious troubles, seriously… Now that’s getting way to serious, I should end it here 😉