will tell her how things were when she was a child and what brands she used to feed her babies as a young mother,” they write. “The Generation X mom will discount stories of the ‘old days’ in an attempt to forget her own unstable childhood and avoid recreating it for her child.” The authors also observe, however, that the Gen-X mother generally regards her own mother as a peer — perhaps an outcome of being raised in a single-mother household — and will listen to her advice as she would to that of a friend.
Friends are extremely important to Gen-X mothers, perhaps even more important than their family of origin. Gen-X mothers depend on friends for everything from emotional support to shopping tips. Market researchers explain that as children, Gen-Xers were often compelled to rely more heavily on their peer groups than on parents for support, and they continue to do so as mothers. The rise of mother-and-baby play groups and online parenting communities such as BabyCenter.com and iVillage reflect the Gen-X mom’s need to connect with other women going through the same life stage to compare notes, commiserate, and offer advice. It also explains at least part of the runaway success of Baby Einstein: Gen-X moms love Julie Aigner-Clark.
A MOM LIKE YOU
Each video or DVD in the Baby Einstein series ends with a segment in which Julie Aigner-Clark introduces herself as the series creator — and as a mom. Gen-X mothers, according to Disney’s market research, watch this segment repeatedly. One reason seems to be that Aigner-Clark is exceptionally ordinary — but not in the conventional way. Nearly every demographic and psychographic group in the United States sees her as one of their own. She has a broadcaster’s nonaccent, and, in the American transient tradition, she is from a middle-class everywhere. She grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, was living in suburban Atlanta when she made the first Baby Einstein video, and now lives outside of Denver. Her demeanor and sensibility bridge major culture gaps. On the one hand, she is cheerful and unpretentious, projecting an image of a suburban heartland stay-at-home mom who always has cupcakes and neat crafts projects waiting for the neighborhood gang. On the other hand, she has the hyphenated last name, cultural values, and educational pedigree of an upper-class urban career mother who schedules play dates for her toddler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Born in the mid-1960s, she sits astride the cusp of the Baby Boom generation and Generation X. She appears to be Every-Mom.
Disney focus groups have revealed that Gen-X mothers see that in the final segment Aigner-Clark is talking to them as a mom herself. Mothers connect with her as if she were a friend. Thus they support her and promote her work to other friends. First-time mothers rave about Baby Einstein videos to other first-timers. The network of Baby Einstein devotees grew quickly, in part because of the rise of e-mail and the Web in the 1990s, but also because of the growing number of mother-and-baby groups flourishing at the time. The company was able to establish immediate credibility with mothers and, soon afterward, with parenting magazines, which conferred awards on the company during its first few years. Viral marketing through new moms was so powerful that until 2003 — when Disney had owned the company for two years — there was no formal advertising for Baby Einstein products. None was needed. All promotion was by word of mouth, from one mother to the next.
Moms’ viral marketing is still the keystone of Disney’s promotional plan. The Baby Einstein Web site highlights a section called Family to Family, in which parents (mostly mothers) can share their product experiences for others to read. They invoke the same themes today as they did when the videos first hit the market. They rave about how much babies love it (“We started playing Baby Mozart and Baby Bach videos when our daughter was 5 weeks old … As soon as that Disney logo and jingle starts and the Baby Einstein caterpillar appears, she is hooked!”). Mothers appreciate being able to have a few moments to themselves, and they believe that the baby is learning something in the process (“My 9 month old has loved the videos and DVD’s since he was 2 months old. Not only have they bought me precious minutes (and hours) of time to do things like ‘take a shower,’ BUT ALSO I have actually seen his recognition skills develop,” swears another mother). Many of the mothers thank Aigner-Clark personally, addressing her warmly by her first name, as if she were a member of their mothers’ group.
Gen-X mothers are also inspired by Aigner-Clark’s ability to balance family with work. They like that she made the first video herself and that her business was inspired by wanting to spend as much time with her baby as possible rather than by the ambition to launch a multimillion-dollar company that would become a profitable division of Disney. Aigner-Clark is the archetypically resourceful, self-reliant Gen-X adult. To shoot the first video, she and her husband borrowed a friend’s video camera and set up an improvised production studio in the basement of their home in Alpharetta, Georgia. Between learning how to use a computer-based video-editing program and raising their toddler, it took the couple about a year to complete the inaugural video. When they were finished, Aigner-Clark began distributing the tape at local mothers’ groups. Moms loved it immediately. Within about a year she had sold 40,000 Baby Einstein videotapes. The next title, Baby Mozart, came out the following year and sold 60,000 copies within eight months. After being in business a little more than a year, the Baby Einstein Company posted more than $1 million in gross sales; by 1999, Aigner-Clark had sold her one millionth video and had rung up $4.5 million.
What started with a single video advertised by word of mouth and distributed to local mommy-and-me groups is now a major division at Disney, featuring sixteen videos, fifty books, sets of flash cards for infants (marketed as Discovery Cards), puppets, mobiles, bouncy seats, shape sorters, stackers, teething rings, and other products emblazoned with the video’s signature animal-puppet characters. But Disney has tried to downplay its ownership of Baby Einstein, because mothers’ loyalty to the brand is dependent on the illusion that they are connected to Aigner-Clark through a grass-roots network.
Gen-X mothers also like Aigner-Clark’s statement that she was motivated by a desire to share her passion for art and literature with her daughter, not to make her a genius. They like her humility. In interviews and talks, Aigner-Clark appears as astonished by her success as someone who has won the lottery. In a down-to-earth tone — and a voice that is naturally infant-soothing — Aigner-Clark told me the story of deciding to stay at home after the birth of her first child, Aspen, in 1994. A former English and art teacher, she wanted to expose her child to things she felt were of artistic value — classical music, seminal artworks, canonical poetry — but the schlep from the suburbs to museums in the city was not easy and, frankly, not much fun for mother or baby. Books were often a nuisance, since her daughter seemed more interested in chewing them than in appreciating their artistic qualities. Aigner-Clark recalls thinking, “Am I the only mom who wants to develop the love of humanities and fine arts in her children?” Probably not, she decided.
And she surely was not the only mom looking for a decent video for her baby to watch. The options for preschoolers were growing — Elmo’s World videos were very popular by that point — but there seemed to be virtually nothing educational for babies or toddlers. Aigner-Clark had read in magazine articles that babies can absorb foreign languages before they are one year old. She wondered if she could produce what she thought of as a video board book, using artful shots of playthings that would capture babies’ attention combined with words in different languages and classical music in the background. But, as she admits, she is no expert.
UNIQUE GIFTS
Experts occupy a precarious position in the heart and mind of the Gen-X mother. Since she does not consider her own mother an expert on child-rearing, she is likely to compare notes with friends. If she wants a more authoritative source, she tends to rely on books by noted pediatricians, such as T. Berry Brazelton, William and Martha Sears, Penelope Leach, and Richard Ferber. But unlike previous generations of mothers, who religiously followed the advice of the celebrity pediatrician of the day, the Gen-X mother may not adhere to any one orthodoxy if it doesn’t suit her own assessment of her family’s needs. Most Gen-X mothers practice some form of “attachment parenting,” which advocates a high level of closeness and connection between
