Baby, it`s you : international capital discovers the under threes

Well-established international entertainment firms such as Disney and Fisher-Price are joining new start-up firms such as Baby Einstein to create a 'Baby' market of products (including toys, games and videos) specifically targeted at children aged 0-3 years. Despite its novelty, the 'Baby' market mirrors older markets that these firms have created around other demographic groups (e.g. older children, adolescents and adults) - it redefines its target demographic group around specific commodities and promotes its redefinition as 'common sense'. The 'Baby' firms redefine babies solely as early learners whose potential to learn can be released by these firms' brand-name 'educational' or 'developmental' products. Many adults buy these products because they accept the firms' redefinition of babies, but other adults ignore the firms' promotional messages and buy the products to give themselves some time apart from their babies. The 'Baby' market is significant for children and adults because it changes young children's relationships with adults and because it subordinates local cultural differences to a children's culture that purports to be 'global' but has, in reality, extremely narrow foundations in class, race and gender.

The effects of the social structure of digital networks on viral marketing performance

Viral marketing is a form of peer-to-peer communication in which individuals are encouraged to pass on promotional messages within their social networks. Conventional wisdom holds that the viral marketing process is both random and unmanageable. In this paper, we deconstruct the process and investigate the formation of the activated digital network as distinct from the underlying social network. We then consider the impact of the social structure of digital networks (random, scale free, and small world) and of the transmission behavior of individuals on campaign performance. Specifically, we identify alternative social network models to understand the mediating effects of the social structures of these models on viral marketing campaigns. Next, we analyse an actual viral marketing campaign and use the empirical data to develop and validate a computer simulation model for viral marketing. Finally, we conduct a number of simulation experiments to predict the spread of a viral message within different types of social network structures under different assumptions and scenarios. Our findings confirm that the social structure of digital networks play a critical role in the spread of a viral message. Managers seeking to optimize campaign performance should give consideration to these findings before designing and implementing viral marketing campaigns. We also demonstrate how a simulation model is used to quantify the impact of campaign management inputs and how these learnings can support managerial decision making.

University marketing and the law: applying the trade practices Act to universities` marketing and promotional activities

Application of the Trade Practices Act and its State equivalents to the  marketing by universities of the courses they teach - ramifications of the Act  are not understood within the wider university community, importantly by   those responsible for marketing courses - the Act prescribes many forms of  conduct not instantly recognised as morally reprehensible and are not  automatically avoided on the ground that they are inconsistent with  acceptable behaviour - the Act creates significant proscriptions, applicable to universities and their staff, which can have serious consequences.

Mickey and Barbie and Strawberry Shortcake: children playing in promotional webs

Many children in 'western' societies experience their circumstances through the ideas, stories, characters and values embodied in a narrow range of games, toys, videos, movies, etc. produced by a small group of companies - based mainly in the USA. These companies deploy their huge economic and cultural resources in integrated marketing strategies that can make it hard for children to avoid encountering brand name goods and services designed and marketed specifically to entice them. These marketing strategies can also make it hard for adults to deal with children's fascination with brand name goods. This article tracks the development of the complex organizational, legal and economic corporate relationships at the heart of integrated marketing strategies and explains how they can affect children's experiences of their world. It asks whether the current narrow range of entertainment products and services for children reflects the social and cultural diversity of contemporary societies and asks how to create equally attractive alternatives.

A comparison of the sources and nature of body image messages perceived by indigenous Fijian and European Australian adolescent girls

Australian and Fijian adolescent girls reported on the influence that sociocultural factors, including parents, peers, and the media, had on their body image attitudes. It was expected that messages that promote a thin body would be less prevalent among Fijians, as their cultural traditions place more importance on robust body sizes. An inductive thematic analysis of the girls’ semi-structured interviews indicated that both Fijian (n = 16) and Australian (n = 16) girls (aged 13–17) reported messages from similar sources, which included parents, siblings, and friends/peers. Australian girls consistently reported messages that reinforced thinness. On the other hand, Fijian girls reported messages that emphasized both thinness and robustness. The discussion focuses on the conflict between Western ideals and cultural Fijian traditions and the implications for culturally sensitive interventions.

Where is all the pressure coming from? Messages from mothers and teachers about preschool children's appearance, diet and exercise

This study used interviews and qualitative analyses to investigate the nature of the messages that preschool children receive from mothers and teachers about their bodies, general appearance, exercise and eating practices. Participants were 10 female teachers and 53 mothers. The behaviours of the 53 children (24 boys, 29 girls) were also observed to determine the nature of their eating and exercise behaviours. The results demonstrated that both mothers and teachers expressed concerns about their own bodies. Mothers also communicated messages to their daughters about losing weight and messages to their sons about increasing their muscles. Both girls and boys were concerned about their appearance, particularly their clothes and hair. Girls also demonstrated some concerns about losing weight, and boys with increasing muscles. Implications of these results are discussed in terms of designing education programs for mothers, teachers and children to prevent the development of body image concerns and disordered eating among children. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association.

Identifying dependency between secure messages for protocol analysis

Collusion attack has been recognized as a key issue in e-commerce systems and increasingly attracted people’s attention for quite some time in the literatures of information security. Regardless of the wide application of security protocol, this attack has been largely ignored in the protocol analysis. There is a lack of efficient and intuitive approaches to identify this attack since it is usually hidden and uneasy to find. Thus, this article addresses this critical issue using a compact and intuitive Bayesian network (BN)-based scheme. It assists in not only discovering the secure messages that may lead to the attack but also providing the degree of dependency to measure the occurrence of collusion attack. The experimental results demonstrate that our approaches are useful to detect the collusion attack in secure messages and enhance the protocol analysis.

Who is responsible for the protection of children? Implicit and explicit interpretations of marketing messages

In this paper, we examine ethical issues related to advertising to children in light of evidence that people can hold ‘implicit’ as well as ‘explicit’ consumer attitudes. From a review of the important features of implicit versus explicit attitudes, we hypothesise three important features of implicit consumer attitudes in children. First, we suggest they are likely to be acquired automatically from, in part, exposure to marketing messages. Second, we predict that these attitudes will be resistant to change through reflection or reason by the child or other person. Third, we hypothesise that children’s implicit consumer attitudes will be powerful predictors of their consumer choices in many situations. We discuss the implications for the ethics of marketing to children, and propose a research framework to begin investigating this important issue.

Mining inconsistent secure messages toward analyzing security protocols

Traditional approaches such as theorem proving and model checking have been successfully used to analyze security protocols. Ideally, they assume the data communication is reliable and require the user to predetermine authentication goals. However, missing and inconsistent data have been greatly ignored, and the increasingly complicated security protocol makes it difficult to predefine such goals. This paper presents a novel approach to analyze security protocols using association rule mining. It is able to not only validate the reliability of transactions but also discover potential correlations between secure messages. The algorithm and experiment demonstrate that our approaches are useful and promising.

Prominent messages in education and applied linguistic abstracts : how do authors appeal to their prospective readers?

This study investigates the rhetorical structure of abstracts of papers published in Applied Linguistics and Education. It examines how abstract authors in these two fields emphasise the significance of their research, and how they appeal to their prospective readership. Although abstracts in both disciplinary groups are found to display a coordinate textual development they exhibit a utilization of different relational schemata to indicate the functional prominence of textual propositions. In particular, different relational patterns are seen to be employed to fulfil the two primary objectives of an abstract: to provide a synopsis of the accompanying article, and to promote it to relevant research and professional communities. The way authors demonstrate the value of their research and their professional credibility appears to be conditioned by disciplinary writing conventions. It is proposed that relational choices, which result in differences in the accentuation of communicative messages in Applied Linguistics and Education abstracts, depend on the perceived relationship between the author and the discourse community in terms of expectations of prior knowledge.

Media reports of heroin overdose spates: public health messages, moral panics or risk advertisements?

This article reports on an investigation of the public health utility of media messages concerning spates (temporal clusters) of heroin-related overdose (HOD) from the perspective of some injecting drug users (IDUs). In-depth qualitative interviews were carried out with a convenience sample of 60 IDUs, in the setting of two Needle and Syringe Programs in an Australian regional city (Geelong) between April and May 2000. Very few interviewees reported that they had personally experienced a spate of overdoses. None of the interviewees reported communicating the existence of a killer batch to other IDUs. No interviewees reported having changed either their injecting practices or the amount of heroin they used following such a media alert. Indeed, a substantial minority of the interviewees reported seeking out these stronger batches and participant narratives illustrate that, for a substantial group of interviewees, the media reporting of a hypothetical 'killer batch' of heroin may have implications for their drug-seeking and health-related behaviour. It was found that the accuracy of information available to IDUs is mixed and that the flow of information within this social network was slow. Findings demonstrate that media reporting of killer batches of heroin has little value as a public health strategy and provide an example of how some activities that are proposed as public health measures may in fact have the opposite effect.