The five myths of marketing to mums

There are five myths of marketing to mums, detailed below, that marketers must wake up to and overcome if they are to reach this group effectively.   

Research from Saatchi & Saatchi, seen by Marketing Week, surveyed 865 mothers across the UK. It found that only 23 per cent are happy with anyone other than their families calling them ‘mum’, and three out of 10 agree they are ‘me first and then a mum’. 

ITV director of commercial marketing and research Sarah Speake says: “As a rule, mums tend to be lumped together as one homogeneous group, which inevitably doesn’t resonate with us all. Whether a stay-at-home mum, single mum, working mum, married mum, mum of younger or older children, we all have fundamentally different requirements to make our lives easier and enable a connection or relationship. 

“Brands that acknowledge these differences resonate better – where both the commonality of adoration of our children and our differences as individuals are recognised.”

Speake and Marketing Week editor Ruth Mortimer discussed the findings at this week’s Mumstock event, organised by Mumsnet in association with Saatchi & Saatchi.

It is easy to see why brands want to target mothers. According to Boston Consulting Group, women control as much as 70 per cent of household purchases and $20tr of consumer spending worldwide.

Boston Consulting also says women will be responsible for $5tr of incremental spending over the next several years – providing a greater commercial potential than the consumer economies of India and China.

Saatchi & Saatchi director of strategy Richard Huntington agrees that treating mothers as one group is unhelpful for both brands and their audience.

“Mum is a word that means an enormous amount to mothers when they think about their roles and responsibilities and the bonds of their family, but it feels as if we are trespassing on the name that children give their mothers,” he says.

And using women in advertising rarely resonates with mothers. The study shows that only 19 per cent of those in the UK believe that there are examples of mums in advertising that they can relate to and sets out a five point plan for communicating with mothers. 

1. Motherhood does not define a person

Mothers today want to be recognised by much more than their children and parenting roles – motherhood is not all-consuming for women and is not the only thing that defines them.

“You don’t lose your identity just because you give birth,” says Mumsnet chief executive Justine Roberts. “Women remain women: they don’t change character simply because they become mums. Their entire focus doesn’t become about being a mother.  

“There is a danger in focusing on the fact that people are mums. Being a mother is fundamental but it isn’t the defining thing about you, so if advertising shows only the motherhood bit, then it misses out on a truth, which is that you don’t completely lose your identity when you become a mother.” 

Huntington says an excellent example of a brand speaking to a woman as a ‘whole person’ is John Lewis’s 2010 campaign. The ad showed a woman’s life stages from being a child to becoming a grandmother set to Fyfe Dangerfield’s cover version of ‘You’re Always a Woman to Me’.

ITV’s Speake believes that society often assumes motherhood defines women. “In my experience, that’s not how we define ourselves,” she says. “Most women are defined by their skills, abilities and passions before they consider having children.

“One of the challenges in early motherhood is often the focus on the child and not the mother, who is the same person she was previously.” 

2. Mothers are not desperately seeking perfection

The research shows that 75 per cent of mothers believe a ‘perfect mum’ does not exist and it is not an aspiration of theirs, with 74 per cent agreeing that they are not perfect and they are not trying to be. 

In 2005, Persil took a different stance to the traditional ‘whiter than white’ laundry advertising in its Dirt is Good campaign, encouraging children to get outdoors and enjoy life. Its most recent advert uses the strapline ‘For whatever life throws’ and features a girl being pelted with all sorts of stain-inducing food and drink, pictured, far right.

Compared with the detergent ads of old showing mothers toiling away, Persil’s new approach embraces a more realistic and fun lifestyle.  

Roberts at Mumsnet echoes the research findings. “I don’t think perfection exists and I’m not sure people are necessarily trying to be perfect either. Also, perfection would be a slightly odd place to be for children growing up, as it’s a lot to live up to if you have a perfect parent.”

Only 9 per cent of mums in the study say they have met a perfect mum.

Speake says: “Very few human beings are perfect, so why would a section of society be? We each have our own definitions of perfection, which are probably the most helpful in leading our behaviours.” 

3. Mothers are not prudes

The study reveals that 30 per cent of mothers agree they have become more ‘mumsy’ and 28 per cent agree they have become more reserved. But only 23 per cent agree they should not talk about certain subjects, such as sex.

Huntington is frustrated with brands that think that mothers need to be treated with kid gloves with regards to humour: “I’m fed up with client briefs saying their audience isn’t into edgy humour – that they like The Vicar of Dibley. I’m not sure when The Vicar of Dibley was taken off air but clients still walk into agencies having conversations like that.”

Old Spice’s Mom Song is an example of a brand going against this. The video shows the anxiety mothers have about their sons being ‘taken away’, falling for women and leaving them as mums, but does so with humour and self-deprecation.

Car-maker Fiat launched a video featuring a mum rapping about the trials of motherhood, which features topics including infant defecation, faking orgasms and bitches – referring to female dogs in the video (see Marketing to mums: hit or miss^[1]).

The film, which has had 4.3 million YouTube views, was inspired by comments made in research groups that Fiat undertook during the planning phases for the launch of its new family range of cars. When discussing their lives, mums shared tales of the reality of being mothers, demonstrating the desire to retain their sense of style and awareness of the latest trends while at the same time tackling family challenges.

Fiat marketing manager Roberta Lombardi says: “The video resonated with mums not only in the UK but across the world. Unlike most ads, the film is a no-holds-barred portrayal of the challenges women face as they grapple with their new role as a mother. It is an edgy and humorous interpretation of everyday family life.”

Roberts at Mumsnet says that although mothers go to the site, which has five million users monthly, for information and advice, they also look for friendship and humour. She adds there is almost a ‘Virgin Mary’ effect when women become mothers.  

“You find a lot of ads targeting men and dads using humour but don’t see many like that targeting women and mothers,” says Roberts. “That’s missing a trick. In the early months and years, some of the ridiculous situations that mums find themselves in, which they would never dream of if they hadn’t given birth to these strange creatures, are often hilariously funny.”      

4. Motherhood is not drudgery

The research suggests marketers believe motherhood is a life of drudgery. However, 60 per cent of mums say that the best fun they have is with their children and the same number say that their kids are more fun to spend time with than most of the adults they know.

Mums are also almost twice as likely to visit photo-sharing sites such as Pinterest and Instagram than adults without children – 9 per cent versus 5 per cent – to share the fun they are having with their families. 

The study advises marketers to focus on the enjoyment mums get from children. Again this is something Unilever realised when working out the ‘Dirt is Good’ strategy, according to its former global vice-president of Persil and Omo David Arkwright. Commoditisation of the category meant advertising had focused on price. At the same time, developing countries were growing and “the freer the world was becoming, the more this category seemed to be locking consumers into a life of marketing drudgery,” says Arkwright in his book ‘The Making of Dirt is Good’.

At a session during Advertising Week Europe this month, advertising agency JWT talked about how society views women. Group planning head Rachel Pashley said we still think of women in the 1950s and talked about their changing role and how advertisers need to respond.   

Pashley said: “The ‘busy working mum’ stereotype still exists and pervades everything that you see.” She is campaigning to retire the term because she feels it is “reductive and out of date”.

5. Don’t forget the fathers

The suggestion that dads are clowns, or worse sideshows, in the parenting department is the final faux pas that marketers make. Sixty per cent of women say their partner is just as involved in parenting as they are – and there is no difference between the opinions of mothers who work and those who do not, so it is important not to isolate fathers but to communicate to the ‘parenting unit’.  

Some brands are already making this change. This year, Birds Eye released its first ad since dropping its Clarence the Bear character, and although it is called ‘Presenting comedy dad’, it focuses neither on the mother nor father but shows the family unit at dinnertime and the conversations they have.

Huntington feels that there has been a lot of dissatisfaction in the relationship between men and women with children in advertising. Now is the time to realise that it is 2014 and a more sophisticated era. He says that it is starting to focus on the more subtle cues of the teamwork between husbands and wives and partners. 

Lego released a father and son-focused ad pre-Christmas 2013, called Let’s Build, and VW created an ad that shows the evolving relationship of a protective father and his daughter from the moment she comes home from hospital after being born to when he waves goodbye as she leaves for university in a VW Polo.  

Brands must consider wealth, class, education and geography, rather than segmentation by how many children a family has and whether a woman works or looks after her kids full-time.

Huntington believes that if marketers continue to follow these myths and market to mums with them in mind, eventually women will switch off.

In so many areas of life, women have escaped from the clichés and assumptions that society has made of them but not so much in marketing. Ultimately, women might rebel against being treated in the same way as they have been since the 1950s and 60s. 

References

1. ^{^} Marketing to mums: hit or miss (www.marketingweek.co.uk)