Branding kids

YOU Mag has been carrying a series of cut-out flash cards to be used as a "powerful tool to teach children letter recognition". Every week deals with a new letter. However, this isn't the traditional "A is for apple, B is for ball" of our own kindergarten years, but rather it's "P is for Palmolive, or Pritt, or PEP" (the series has obviously been running for some while). Thrown in for good measure this week are a few non-P-starting brands such as hp invent, Super M, Quick Shop and 1 Stop.

Now I'm sure that these cards ARE a powerful reading development tool. I myself remember learning to spell new words from brand names on packaging, words like Fizz Pop, Simba Chips and Lucky Strike. But I doubt whether even the company behind this novel idea, Brand Knew, would be able to argue that these brand name flash cards are more effective than having kids make their own by drawing pictures of apples, balls, cats and dogs, and getting mommy to ink the words in for them.

The way I see it, these brand name flash cards yield far greater benefits to Brand Knew and their sponsors than it does for the children. Brand Knew supposedly gets paid and the brands get their exposure - and what valuable exposure it is, too! It's an almost guaranteed investment that these brands will be fairly imprinted on these kids' brains by the time they become fully fledged credit card carriers. (I wonder if 'M' was for 'MasterCard'...)

As I said, the idea discomforts me somewhat. One would like to think that the art of selling has changed much for the better since the days of the snake-oil boom, and so it has, but it seems an insidious streak has remained. Frighteningly, for me, anyway, is the fact that today's gullible marks have been unwittingly roped in to finish the pitch on their defenceless, impressionable children.

The person who came up with the idea is most certainly a genius, and quite possibly has all the best of intentions, however I can't help but imagine him as a figure standing a-ways behind the scene in a dark cape, softly chuckling.