Cereal Box Marketing

“Apparently, Trix really are for kids after all, but not in the way you might have thought.” This quote comes from one of the opening paragraphs of an article on cereal box marketing. This article is titled, “Cereal Characters Lure Kiddies With Eye Gaze: Study”. Interesting, am I right?
Have you ever thought about what your cereal box looked like before? A lot of the cereals that are sugary and extra yummy are decided to target children. When you are walking down the cereal aisle in the grocery store have you ever noticed that they all have a character on them? If you’ve noticed that have you ever noticed where that character is looking?

 Cornell University did a study on this and they found out some pretty interesting results.

 This article can be found here:

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/cereal-characters-lure-kiddies-eye-gaze-study-n70826
The Character on that sugary cereal box has it’s eyes pointed downward to insure that kids running through the grocery store with mom or dad, will lock eyes with that “Lucky Charm’s leprechaun” and instantly beg their parents to buy it.
It is great marketing if you ask me!

According to the article, “The researchers provided two key takeaways from their findings. One, parents should think about not taking their children down the cereal aisle. Two, manufacturers of healthier cereals could consider adding a character looking downwards to the box to make their cereal more appealing to younger consumers.”

This is very true in my opinion. This could help healthier cereals draw in more children. This would be very beneficial to the health of my generation and generations after mine, as well.

This cereal box character’s gaze directly into the eyes of your children and draw them in, with a little help from your child’s imagination. So why not trick your child into being drawn in by a healthy cereal choice?

I think this could benefit parents and children by making children more excited about eating healthy cereal.

I found this article very interesting because it is like a psychological game that these marketing companies are playing on children and even some adults. I would like to look more into this and figure out what other kinds of marketing games are played on the innocent. Especially those like this that we would have never noticed before reading this article. It’s a strange world when your mind plays tricks on you!