In response to the obesity epidemic, much discussion in the public health and child advocacy communities has centered on restricting food and beverage marketing practices directed at children. 1 A common retort

Through this literature review, the authors explore financial education’s relevance to urban society. They consider research measuring children’s financial development by observing environmental influences that affect both financial learning and personal judgments. These conditions necessitate financial curricula addressing associated challenges. The authors recommend a cooperative rather than competitive financial education curriculum. Such a framework would employ student-centered instruction to create awareness of the societal consequences for financially based personal judgments related to financial differences.

Director: Professor G B Hastings

r marketing academic researchers and practitioners. In the 1990s, a whopping 81% of new products introduced were brand extensions (Keller 1998). While many new products generally fail, every year the most successful ones tend to be brand extensions (Aaker 1991). Starbuck's ice cream, Nokia cellular phones, and Nike sportswear are just a few recent successful examples. In light of their importance, brand extensions have received much attention in academic research during the past decade. One of the most robust findings in past research is the role of the semantic relationship between the parent brand and extension category in determining brand extension evaluations (Aaker and Kel- *Shi Zhang is assistant professor, and Sanjay Sood is assistant professor, both at the Anderson School, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095; e-mail: shi.zhang@anderson.ucla.edu; sanjay.sood@ anderson.ucla.edu. The authors contributed equally to the article. They acknowledge the financi

© 2004 Story and French; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the article's original URL. In recent years, the food and beverage industry in the US has viewed children and adolescents as a major market force. As a result, children and adolescents are now the target of intense and specialized food marketing and advertising efforts. Food marketers are interested in youth as consumers because of their spending power, their purchasing influence, and as future adult consumers. Multiple techniques and channels are used to reach youth, beginning when they are toddlers, to foster brand-building and influence food product purchase behavior. These food marketing channels include television advertising, in-school marketing, product placements, kids clubs, the Internet, toys and products with brand logos, and youth-targeted promotions, such as cross-selling and tie-ins. Foods marketed to children are predominantly high in sugar and fat, and as such are inconsistent with national dietary recommendations. The purpose of this article is to examine the food advertising and marketing channels used to target children and adolescents in the US, the impact of food advertising on eating behavior, and current regulation and policies.

Marketing practices that promote calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods directly to children and adolescents present significant public health risk. Worldwide, calls for government action and industry change to protect young people from the negative effects of food marketing have increased. Current proposals focus on restricting television advertising to children under 12 years old, but current psychological models suggest that much more is required. All forms of marketing pose considerable risk; adolescents are also highly vulnerable; and food marketing may produce far-reaching negative health outcomes. We propose a food marketing defense model that posits four necessary conditions to effectively counter harmful food marketing practices: awareness, understanding, ability, and motivation to resist. A new generation of psychological research is needed to examine each of these processes, including the psychological mechanisms through which food marketing affects young people, to identify public policy that will effectively protect them from harmful influence. Over the past 30 years, the prevalence of obesity in the United States and

A fundamental issue in regard to our field has been raised at various points, most recently in an article on “Consumer Psychology ” in the Annual Review series. I am consistently impressed with the way that authors of those chapters are able to synthesize a great deal of the current literature in consumer behavior. The recent chapter by Simonson, Carmon, Dhar, Drolet and Nowlis (2000) was no exception in its excellence. A provocative question posed by Itamar Simonson and his colleagues (2000) is what distinguishes consumer research from other disciplines. They note that, “it is sometimes unclear what differentiates consumer research from other disciplines, except for the experimental stimuli used (e.g., choice between cars versus choice between bets) and the research positioning ” (p. 263). Much of the research we conduct addresses issues that have general relevance rather than suggesting that our discipline has “a unique identity and purpose that separates it from other fields” (p. 262). Are we behavioral scientists who just happen to be using a consumer context to investigate general principles of human behavior? Why should we study consumer behavior if it is essentially the same as in other contexts? Perhaps because of my training as a social psychologist and that discipline’s emphasis on

Abstract. Drawing upon historical research, contemporary academic treatments of children’s geographies and some preliminary observations of a few ‘children’s ’ retail settings in the USA, this article concentrates on building an analytic of commercialized children’s spaces. An account of the construction of retail departments specifically for children in USA clothing stores in the 1930s offers an insight into two intersecting spatial dimensions: aspirational and proprietary spaces. These, in turn, inform how versions of the ‘child consumer ’ shape, and have been shaped by, spatially situated market considerations. Key words children ● children’s geographies ● clothing ● consumer culture ● gender ● retail spaces WE ALL HAVE ENCOUNTERED THEM – THE PRIMARY COLORS, the blocked, angled or backward letters, the scribble-writing effect, the chalkboard motif. At once eye-catching and unmistakable in reference, these symbols and images constitute part of the iconography of children’s culture. Most often and most intentionally, they signify a children’s consumer culture. They say, ‘kids ’ stuff here! ’ and direct both children and parents to differentiate that which refers to ‘kids ’ from other items in the visual–spatial landscape of commerce.

either author. The authors would like to extend thanks to the editors (Joe Cote, John Murray) and the reviewers for their helpful comments.

A variety of approaches have been used to infer decision rules used by consumers. These approaches include protocol methods, self-reports, and non-linear compensatory and noncompensatory models of judgement. But there is little work on inferring the rules from choice or preference data, a situation that stands in contrast with the great progress in data-analytic techniques for linear models. There are well-known reasons for this, the most important being the ability of a linear model to predict preferences even when people use non-compensatory heuristics, and the ready availability of software programs that enable sophisticated analysis using linear compensatory models. A more desirable situation is to augment the existing analytical approaches by models that do not compromise on predictive ability and permit inferences about the underlying decision process. Ideally, the implementation of these approaches should be simple and allow use of standard software programs. The authors introduce one such model, which infers generalized forms of conjunctive/disjunctive rules from binary (acceptable/unacceptable) classifications of multiattribute alternatives. The first generalization is the introduction of a subset-conjunctive