Pester Power and Marketing

One of the important aspect of marketing involves understanding thought process of pestering agents, identifying the products that can be targeted for them and reaching them by proper means and ensuring that the purchase process does happen. Still if you are not certain of who these "Pestering Agents" let me explain some of the concepts that will make the things clear.

Pester Power: "The power children have, by repeated nagging, of influencing their parents to buy advertised or fashionable items".

It has been observed in many societies over a long period of time that children always have the power to influence their parent's purchase process. This is quite significant as usually the parents give up their stands for the relentless pestering of children for the substances they like. More often than not, the parents tend to buy items that they find to be trivial and have low involvement, but usually it happens that, they are the costliest item on their purchase list.

From a marketing perspective, we can look at various aspects of the "Pestering Agents" behaviors:

• The way in which the pestering differs between a girl and a boy and how they approach the "Pestering process"
• The difference in pestering mechanism of children of different age groups, like "KIDS", "TWEENS" and "TEENS".
• Impact of the promotions and offers in their decision for pestering.
• Impact of size, colour, appearance and taste(INDULGENCE) for the pestering to happen.
• The changing times and societal influences on pestering for the products.

I will also explain in detail the purchase process and emotional state of the parents during and after the purchase process and "Strategies" that the parents devise to avoid the pestering effect. In addition we will also look at the To understand the buying behavior of the children, we will also look at how "Visibility" matters for the children for the purchase they make on their own and their unplanned purchase process and the scope it allows for the marketers to target them.

Importantly, the pestering mechanism of the children need not be restricted only to the products that they consume, It can be even the products that their parents use and their siblings and peers use. I will further discuss on the aspects that make them to "pester" for these products which they would not use, but feel-good buying those for their siblings or parents or friends.