Kidfluence: Why Kids Today Mean Business

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

With $15 billion of spending power in their designer jeans, Canadian
kids (Generation Y) have become an economic “force to be reckoned
with.” In catchy magazine-style prose, marketing guru Anne Sutherland
and award-winning journalist Beth Thompson, survey and analyze the
newfound marketplace phenomenon of “kidfluence.”

In 12 well-researched chapters, the authors describe the evolution of
children’s influence on family purchases, the impact of changing
family structures on modern consumerism, the changing sociocultural
environment for today’s kids, the influence of the wired world on
Generation Y, the uniqueness of kid’s culture, and the major economic
power wielded by the skateboard crowd. They predict a future in which
the “more” generation will experience more choices for work,
entertainment, lifestyles, technology, and prosperity, as well
as—incredibly—even more information overload than we see today. The
revelations in their reader-friendly book will fascinate not only
retailers, marketers, and sociologists, but mom and pop as well.