Children's Reactions to Advertising Communication

(eng) This paper investigates 8- to 11-year-olds' reactions to advertising communication with a specific focus on the construct validity of the scales used to measure the main variables studied. An initial phase of comprehensive scale development was indeed conducted, combining qualitative and quantitative methods in an attempt to provide a richer understanding of the constructs investigated. Next, we ran four experiments designed to study the impact of three moderating variables (felt involvement, mood, time of measurement) on the relationships among the advertising effectiveness indicators (ad attitude, brand attitude, brand beliefs, intent to request the brand, brand choice). Even though the results provide insights on advertising persuasiveness among kids they are only briefly sketched, our objective being more to show the richness of a multi-method approach in a children's population and to discus several methodological issues such as the appropriateness of using moderating variables when kids are the subjects of the study.