Earlier this year, I wrote a piece called Are You Marketing to Moms Online? In it, I cited some recent demographic data from Nielsen which categorized online Moms in six distinctive behavioral classifications. Marketers and advertisers love breaking people down into segments and targeting messages with as much precision as they can.
Of course, the reality is that there are many more than six segments when it comes to Moms online. About six million more. You see, Moms (and Dads for that matter) are people who, like anyone else labeled conveniently by a general classification; are actually spending their time trying to do and be so many different things. Sure, they might be a Soccer Mom during that hour when they are standing on the sidelines as their children take the field; but they are also a Yoga Mom when they go to their Ananda class that night – or an Epicurean Mom when they are preparing for the dinner party they are having this weekend.
Stacy Morrison, who herself is a Magazine Editor Mom, provides a refreshing insight and some sage advice to marketers and advertisers who want so badly to lump Moms into six neatly packaged groups.
“…Yes, we moms want to be witnessed, to spend some time on our “to-be” list, instead of merely living our “to-do” list, to get to be women first sometimes, just for ourselves. We get to be a “mom and” these days, not “just a stay-at-home mom” or a “working mom,” but a mom and a yoga teacher, a mom and an entrepreneur, a mom and a community organizer, a mom and a beauty addict, a mom and a church leader, a mom and so much more. And the only way for a marketer to learn the “so much more” is to open your ears (and your email in-box, and your Facebook page, and your whatever else you can imagine) and ask the question: “Hello, who are you?” And then listen..” continue reading
So, the next time you are designing a message to your Soccer Mom list or preparing an ad for your CEO Mom audience; you might want to communicate instead with the people who happen to do these things, rather than to the group who is defined by them. And before you do that, you might just want to sit back and listen for a while.
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