When do non-food brands matter to children?

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the body of knowledge on the topic of consumer socialization of children. There are growing concerns about marketing to children and the ethics behind it. It is therefore important to know how much marketers influence children and how their influence can be limited. Our study aims to provide insights into this phenomenon using the example of non-food brands in the context of Slovenia, where the topic has received little attention so far. The results of our qualitative research on six focus groups of children aged 7-13 show that there are differences in brand importance and brand recall between younger and older children. Children believe brands are important for specific non-food products; how%ever, older participants, rather than younger ones, believed that brands are important for a greater number of the non-food product groups presented. The results show that marketers are successfully trying to appeal to children, which is ethically questionable, so we propose some solutions to this problem.