In recent years, leading digital technology companies have shown a strong interest in enabling children to send electronic word of mouth (eWOM). Recasting children from passive to active participants in marketing communications, this shift expands children’s marketing practices from how a company influences children via traditional marketing communications to how children influence a company’s marketing practices through eWOM. This paper aims to enhance our understanding about the use of children’s eWOM in marketing communications when children’s eWOM and children’s marketing begin to intersect. The eWOM literature demonstrated the effects of eWOM on product sales without identifying the sender (King, Racherla, & Bush, 2014). The extension of the effects from aggregated sender to children needs careful study in light of children’s marketing literature which showed children have distinct characteristics in the context of traditional marketing (Cross, 2002). In this study, we examine the positive expectation of business impact that explains firms’ adoption of children’s eWOM and further investigate the normative concerns about the social influence of children’s eWOM.

• Tong (Tony) Bao(Long Island University-Post, USA)
• Tung-lung Steven Chang(Long Island University-Post, USA)
• Alex J. Kim(Ewha Womans University, Republic of Korea)