Social media (SM) platforms are frequently used by pre-teen (8-12-year old) consumers for curating their self-identity, developing social relationships and for learning. This paper identifies the building blocks that drive pre-teen SM engagement. We use the Gioia method to analyse interview data collected from 32 pre-teens and parents, in France. Findings show that the primary building blocks are FoMO (Fear of Missing Out) and social inclusive experience, being noticed online, multiplicity, excessive use (without guidelines) and self-regulation. Identity constructs (self-identity and socialidentity) are used to explain SM engagementand to empirically define core conceptual building blocks (aggregate dimensions) that drive SM engagement. We contribute to consumer theory by developing a holistic research framework to examine pre-teen SM engagement. Self-identity and social-identity theories help explain the factors that drive pre-teen SM engagement and explain push/pull influences of parents and schools in encouraging or discouraging certain behaviour. We build on current research into SM usage, drawing from the fragmented existing literature, to reveal causes of both excessive screen-time and SM usage among pre-teen consumers, which may indicate antecedents of future adult behaviour. Practical and regulatory policy issues are considered and addressed.

The practice of audience segregation, demographic profiling and manufactured viewerships has become common practice in the television industry since the turn towards niche programming and narrowcasting in an increasingly multichannel environment. While much critical scholarship has been devoted to the way that media companies undertake extensive market research to target their products to specific demographic segments, this article concentrates on the way that untargeted and unexpected viewers have coalesced around certain television programmes, and become the ‘accidental audience’. ‘Bronies’ have become the most well-known accidental audience in recent years, and are a perfect case study by which this phenomenon can be examined. The article therefore explores the way that accidental audiences develop, and how they offer both opportunity and threat to the managed selling of media brands. This article will also engage with the issues surrounding identifying and responding to these accidental audiences. Using the ‘Brony’ fandom of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, this article asks how accidental audiences develop and how, in particular, the Internet serves to shape and cultivate them.

Economics and ecology both present us with a key challenge: scaling up from individual behaviour to community‐level effects. As a result, biologists have frequently utilized theories and frameworks from economics in their attempt to better understand animal behaviour. In the study of predator–prey interactions, we face a particularly difficult task—understanding how predator choices and strategies will impact the ecology and evolution not just of individual prey species, but whole communities. However, a similar challenge has been encountered, and largely solved, in Marketing, which has created frameworks that successfully predict human consumer behaviour at the community level. We argue that by applying these frameworks to non‐human consumers, we can leverage this predictive power to understand the behaviour of these key ecological actors in shaping the communities they act upon. We here use predator–prey interactions, as a case study, to demonstrate and discuss the potential of marketing and human‐consumer theory in helping us bridge the gap from laboratory experiments to complex community dynamics.

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