Open Access

Hanna Bergner

• The aim of this Bachelor Thesis is to analyze the child safety lock offered by Samsung, which is one of the latest inventions on the market for Smartphones. It will be discussed if its abilities are a solution for ethical problems, which come along with Mobile Marketing on children. Furthermore it will be identified if the child safety lock, as a product, keeps the promises Samsung made to the consumers. Smartphones are gaining greater importance in today’s society and are not only used by adults, but by a great amount of children. A smartphone gives kids the possibility to enter the internet without barriers. They have access to all the offered websites and programs the internet contains, which opens up a lot of dangers. Marketing on children is getting more intensive, because children play a more important role in the buying decisions of their families than they did in the past. There are plenty of studies where children´s perception of advertisement was analyzed. A relationship between their perception of advertisement and the development of their cognitive thinking was detected. The more distinctive the cognitive thinking is, the better is their perception of advertisement. Advertisement and other marketing methods can influence and manipulate children, without them realizing it. Due to that there a discussions on ethical level about the fairness of confronting children with contents they can´t understand because of their stage of development. Notably mobile marketing describes a lot of dangers for children owing to its availability on a Smartphone 24/7. The two most important laws regarding media protection for children is the “Jugendschutzgesetz” (JuSchG), which is administrated by the German government and the “Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag”, which is in hands of the 16 federal states in Germany. The opinion of experts in the field of media education, as well as the opinion of parents and teachers about the mentioned topics is essential to bring different stakeholders into the account. This paper contains several empirical research methods which discuss these opinions. Key words: Marketing and Ethics, Smartphones, Marketing aimed on children, Mobile Marketing, Media Protection for children