According to a new Saatchi & Saatchi study, Moms and Marketing: IRL (In Real Life), that researched nearly 8,000 mothers with children ranging from newborns to 17-year-olds from China, Germany, Italy, India, Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S, there is a huge gap between what marketers think moms want compared to their actual needs and desires.
According to the survey, 51 percent of respondents feel that marketers don’t really understand them and that advertisers have an outdated perspective over the entire motherhood concept.
And considering that there are more than 2 billion moms in the world, thinking that half of this valuable market feels neglected and misunderstood, it’s not a very good sign for marketers and companies alike. In this context, marketers need to abandon the preconceptions of mothers being stay-at-home moms and to take into account that “career” is part of the modern mom identity.
The research identified a huge gap between what marketers think mothers want and how they really feel:
According to Australian news source B&T, if marketers really want to reach mothers more effectively, they need to pay attention to these nine unique roles which moms value, identified in the Saatchi & Saatchi study:
- Carer (47 per cent)
- Safe house (7 per cent)
- Coach (11 per cent)
- Fan (5 per cent)
- Playmate (4 per cent)
- Rule breaker (2 per cent)
- Friend (4 per cent)
- Hero (7 per cent)
- Elder (13 per cent)
In Mary Mills’s (worldwide director of strategic intelligence at Saatchi) opinion, marketers should change things up and market to the many different roles that mothers play in the day to day life, because “Each of these roles provides your brand and business with relatively uncontested territory in which to engage moms,”
Mills points out that “Motherhood is about being, not doing, and yes the aim of every mom is surely to be a good mother, but not to do well at motherhood.” So, advertisers and companies should “stop treating motherhood as a job,” and quit constantly positioning goods and services as furthering women’s maternal “careers”.
“Avoid the ‘happy housewife,’ the one-dimensional caretaker, the striving perfectionist,” said Mills to B&T. “Motherhood is not an innate ability, and moms feel they never quite nail it, so remind her that mastery is not required.”
To download the Moms and Marketing: IRL(In Real Life) study, click here.
