Marketing genius: The impact of educational claims and cues on parents' reactions to infant/toddler DVDs

Infant/toddler-directed DVDs have become commonplace in American homes. Most of these DVDs carry direct claims or implied cues of educational benefit, despite complaints from the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood and others regarding a lack of confirmatory research. Using a DVD package created for this study, this experiment tested the impact of DVD brand name, educational claim specificity, and a personality dimension (i.e., regulatory focus orientation) on parents' perceptions of educational value and purchase intentions. Parents reacted similarly to specific and ambiguous educational statements, but gave higher educational value estimations when the brand name had an educational cue. An interaction suggested that the effect of the claim outcome specificity depended on the claim verb specificity. Parents with a strong focus on pursuing possible rewards (promotion focus) had higher perceptions of educational value and stronger desires to purchase the DVD. Implications for policy and further research are discussed. ********** In October of 2011 the American Academy of Pediatrics reissued their policy statement discouraging screen media use with children younger than age two (AAP 2011). In their statement, the AAP states "Although infant/toddler programming might be entertaining, it should not be marketed as or presumed by parents to be educational" (AAP 2011, 4). Yet, survey research indicates that many parents do believe these products to be of educational value for young children, and that this belief is associated with higher rates of viewing among their babies and toddlers (Rideout and Hamel 2006; Vandewater et al. 2007; Zimmerman, Christakis, and Meltzoff 2007a). Many researchers, clinicians, and child advocates have grown concerned by the extent of daily viewing among babies and toddlers, which is over 2 hours on average among children three years old and younger (2.23 hours) (Vaala, Bleakley, and Jordan 2013). The Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC) filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the spring of 2006, alleging that two media production companies were marketing baby media products to parents under false pretenses (CCFC 2006). The complaint named Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby as the offending companies. These production companies, relative giants in their field, each produce many "educational" media products designed for use with infants and toddlers. The CCFC contended that claims made by producers in reference to their products indicate that the videos can educate very young children, though such claims are devoid of any publicly available empirical support. In fact, organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and US Department of Health and Human Services advocate no television or video viewing among children under the age of two years (AAP 2011; USDHHS 2010). Hence, according to the CCFC, the companies producing these media should face legal consequences for misleading consumers. Notably, this issue extends beyond these two baby media production companies. In a 2010 content analysis of 58 commercially available DVDs for infants and toddlers, Fenstermacher and colleagues found that each DVD carried an average of nearly 12 different statements implying educational benefits on packaging and associated websites and marketing materials. These statements ranged considerably in the extent to which they specified particular, measurable learning outcomes associated with viewing the video (e.g., learn "vocabulary vs. language skills"), as well as the extent to which statements used particular, measurable behavioral learning verbs (e.g., "learn" vocabulary vs. "promote" vocabulary development) (Fenstermacher et al. 2010). Following the complaints made by CCFC, Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby changed the claims associated with their products on websites and DVD packaging. Instead of using words that conveyed verifiable behavioral learning verbs and outcomes in their claims (e. …