Consumer Oriented Marketing: Seafood Consumption Among Children

Parents’ dominance on determination of food consumption pattern of children has been changing in recent years by the effect of developing social communication via information technologies, improving education level and changing social status of the community. Increasing awareness of children on sustainable and healthy nutrition issues affects consumption habits of the modern families. Today, parents give more importance to the preference and proposals of their children for the food selection. In previous decade, adults were more health conscious and prefer healthy foods than the young ones but today an enormous amount of efforts has been launched to educate children about consuming healthy foods than never before. Families with the children are an important market segment for the seafood industry. However, children’sdislike of seafood or strong preferences for fast-food type consumption is the barriers to seafood marketing in many cases. Consequently, children are the preferential targets of seafood promotions and campaigns in most countries to gain more consumers today and in the future. In this study, seafood consumption pattern and preferences of the children in age group of 10-14 has been researched. Randomly selected 400 children were surveyed through a questionnaire with personal interviews. The surveys have been conducted in primary schools of two cities which localized as seaside and inland in west part of Turkey. Findings derived from the research have indicated that social interaction among children has strong impact on seafood consumption habit. Moreover, children would promote seafood consumption in their families. Besides education the forms of seafood specially cooked and packaged attractive to their age group and promotion campaigns lead most children to demand and consume more seafood. This paper provides sample clues for improving marketing strategy by focusing on children’s seafood consumption. The reasons of seafood resistance have to be identified clearly and continuouslyfor the consumer oriented marketing in seafood. Keywords: marketing, seafood, consumption, children, consumer oriente