Abstract

This article explores metropolitan South African adolescents’ social influence from a consumer behaviour and power relational theory perspective. The research focuses on consumers’ social and interpersonal environment within a family context and measures the extent to which South African metropolitan adolescents exercise rational and emotional influence tactics as social interaction strategy to change parents’ final food and clothing purchase behaviour. The article explores different influence tactics used across different family types, providing evidence that parents’ educational level and household income and size are major predictors of the type of influence tactics applied by adolescents to persuade parents to change their food and clothing purchase behaviour. In some family structures, adolescents are more inclined to apply emotional tactics to influence parents’ final food and clothing purchase behaviour decisions. The research builds on similar research conducted largely in the United States, China and Israel, enriching existing knowledge of the choice of influence tactics being affected by diverse factors and attempting to guide predictions about choice of influence tactics. Since research investigating rational and emotional influence tactics is fairly limited, this study can justifiably be regarded as innovative.

Key words: Adolescent influence tactics, rational influence tactics, emotional influence tactics, childrens' influence, kidfluence.