How our adolescent children influence us as parents to yield to their purchase requests

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence tactics used by adolescent children and parental yielding to these tactics outside North America. Design/methodology/approach – Parents of children ages ten to 18 in Israel were surveyed. The questionnaire included questions on adolescents' influence tactics for two products – breakfast cereals and athletic shoes. It also included items to assess parental yielding. Findings – The findings indicate that Israeli adolescents use rational tactics more often than emotional tactics for both products. Parental yielding follows the same pattern – it is highest for rational tactics and lowest for emotional tactics for both products.Research limitations/implicationsSome ways to improve on this kind of research in the future are using a non‐convenience sample with more balanced gender composition of adolescents and collecting data from multiple countries. Practical implications – One important implication of our findings is that, given that parents are more likely to respond to rational rather than emotional tactics, marketers' efforts toward parents need to use similar appeals. Another practical implication pertains to how parents can handle constant purchase/consumption requests by their children. The findings suggest that parents can find comfort in the fact that not yielding to emotional tactics like guilt trips is quite common (and, therefore, okay) among parents in different places in the world. Originality/value – An important contribution of this research is that it examines an important issue, children's influence on family decision making, in a culture outside North America. Children's influence on family purchases continues to grow, both within the USA and elsewhere. Yet, with a few exceptions, most empirical studies were conducted in the USA and less is known about children's influence elsewhere.