This research analyzes the influence of children on their parents’ personal purchases. Prior research focuses on children’s influence on family purchases and products consumed by children themselves. There is a knowledge gap in whether and how children influence personal purchases of their parents. Building on reciprocal theory, this research proposes that children have influence on their parents’ personal item purchases because of attitude exchange. This reciprocal influence and attitude exchange should be derived from co-shopping frequency. That is, the greater the interaction between the two parties – especially at the point of purchase, which is co-shopping – the greater the reciprocity. Additionally, this influence increases as parents age. In order to test the research questions, mothers were chosen as respondents because they are the primary caregivers for children, and as a result, there should be high reciprocal influence between mothers and their children. A sample of 304 mothers with a mean age of 46.6 years participated in this study. The results support the first hypothesis that the co-shopping frequency between parents and children positively influences parents’ personal purchases. The results also support the second hypotheses that the parents’ age positively influences the children’s influence on parents’ personal purchases. This is in line with prior research which determined that children become more influential as they grow older. To my knowledge, this paper is the first to extend the knowledge of children’s influence on family-decision making – beyond selecting products for the children and products for the family – to the influence on personal purchases of parents.

Consumers from an emerging country generally associate brands from developed countries with high quality. An interesting question is how do they perceive different brands with different positioning strategies? While many more brands position themselves as global brands rather than foreign brands, I argue that for emerging country consumers, there should not be a perceived quality difference between a global brand using the English language versus a foreign brand using other languages written in the Latin alphabet. This could be because consumers stereotype the country image at the regional level and appearance level, not at the country level. This should be most salient when consumers are less familiar and/or more distant from the country being evaluated.