When does product brand matter to children?

How children assess a product's brand and other perceptual attributes is one of the primary issues of consumer socialization. To date, we know little about the age at which children begin to perceive product brand as a dominant feature compared with other perceptually salient product attributes. This critical point in the maturation of a child was examined in two studies of 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children. In these studies, the children performed categorization tasks that were based on Chiu's paradigm in the first study and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test in the second study. The results indicate that product brand did not matter to children until the age of 9 years. For the 9- and 11-year-old children, the product's brand became the dominant feature in their product categorization compared with other perceptual attributes. We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of these results for child-oriented education and marketing.