Nurturing Brand Loyalty

With Preschool Supplies, Firms Woo Future Customers -- And Current Parents

Director Anikka McKoy reads to toddlers at All My Children Child Development Center in Northeast. She has used the Pizza Hut reading program. (Photos Michael Lutzky -- The Washington Post)

Companies eager to court young consumers and their parents are targeting a new marketing outlet: preschools.

Ford Motor Co., for instance, is sending posters this week to 100,000 preschools, child-care centers and kindergarten classrooms to encourage children ages 2 to 5 to think about safety in the home, on the beach and, of course, in the car. The poster is an alphabet of safety tips. Not surprisingly, A is for automobile. (F is for firetruck, not Ford.)

With nearly 4 million youngsters attending some sort of organized child care, the potential market -- kids and parents -- is too great for companies to pass up. So the standard art supplies, blocks, trucks and dolls are being supplemented with Milton Bradley and Care Bears worksheets, Purell hand-cleaning activities, and Pizza Hut reading programs.

There are no precise numbers on how much small fry and their folks spend, but children's marketing expert James U. McNeal estimates that U.S. households with preschool children spend more than $100 billion a year.

And while parents of preschoolers spend less than those with older children, McNeal said, "they have more market potential than the older kids -- they have all their purchases and influence on parental purchases ahead of them."

Paul Kurnit, president of KidShop, a youth marketing firm, predicts the preschool market will grow largely because "the current generation of parents are voracious to know and learn everything to do that's right for their kids." And many parents will see this kind of program and think the school has endorsed it so the product must be good, he said.

That's exactly what troubles Susan Linn, a Harvard psychologist who co-founded the national coalition Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children. She knows that in times of tight budgets, many preschools need supplies. But having commercially sponsored activities in preschools, she says, represents a school's "endorsement of a product and makes kids think that product is good for them."

Preschoolers, Linn said, "are so much more susceptible to advertising because young children tend to believe everything they see. They can't distinguish easily between commercials and TV programs; they can't distinguish persuasive intent." Besides, she said, teachers don't need corporate sponsors to show kids good hand-washing techniques: "All you need is a sink and water for kids to process good health habits. Kids love to play with soap and bubbles."

Sponsors Rush In

Regardless, the trend is clear. Lee-Allison Scott, vice president of Primrose School Franchising Co., which has 114 preschools, mostly in the South, said she used to get solicitations for one or two corporate-sponsored programs a year. "Now, I probably get one or two a month."

Some are requests from major food companies to conduct taste tests of their new products among the young students. "We've chosen to participate in a few, but only if the food is nutritional and if it can be done educationally," such as by teaching comparison and descriptive language skills, Scott said. "We don't do them very often."

Sharon Bergen, vice president of education and training for Knowledge Learning Corp., which has more than 900 child-care centers nationwide, has also seen a steady increase in corporate-sponsored programs over the past three years. "Most of the programs have more parent appeal than kid appeal, but we try to find those that have both," she said.

Marketing and educational officials say the corporate interest in preschools is a logical extension of the commercial presence in elementary and high schools. Every year, teachers say, there seem to be more business-sponsored workbooks, posters, book covers, contests and field trips. That's in addition to the Coke and Pepsi vending machines in schools, though concern about childhood obesity has led to movements in some school districts to restrict or ban the machines.

Mark R. Ginsberg, executive director of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, said its "no secret why so many schools are welcoming" a corporate presence. "Virtually every child-care center I know is struggling to find enough funds on an annual basis to fund quality programming for young children. It's very difficult to raise these funds by tuition alone."

Although his association, which accredits child-care centers, takes no official position on corporate-funded programs in schools, Ginsberg said: "It's great these public-private partnerships can exist and nurture high-quality programming for children."