accountable for providing a happy and, above all, secure home life. As the marketers Maria Bailey and Bonnie Ulman point out, “While Baby Boomer moms believed it took a village to raise a child, Gen-X moms believe it takes a family.” It is not that they necessarily expect life to be perfect; their own childhood experiences in many ways compelled them to adopt a self-reliant and clear-eyed view of life. And they do not expect their children to be perfect.
Gen-X mom says she does not care if her child is a genius. She believes that her child has “unique gifts” that make him special. Above all, she wants him to have fun, to make friends, and to be happy. Companies that failed to take note of Gen-X mom’s sensitivities suffered in the early years of this century. The neurotically named toy company Neurosmith went out of business in 2003, as did the toy-store chain Zany Brainy. To steer away from the Boomer “education” stigma, Fisher-Price phased out its Baby Smartronics line of infant toys and changed its tag line to “Laugh, Learn, Grow” to reflect Generation X’s preference for emotional stability over intellectual prowess.
Interestingly, however, “learn” still has to be there in some form. Though the Gen-X mother may say she doesn’t care how smart her children are, her spending patterns tell a different story. Many marketers have contended that although she views her concern as a rejection of the Boomer value of prizing achievement over support, she is still a product of that value herself. That is, Gen-X mothers are not just members of the first generation to have been raised in daycare. They are also the first to have come of age during the baby genius phenomenon. Gen-X moms say they don’t like toys that are aggressively marketed as educational, but they buy them anyway.
One marketing study revealed that Gen-X moms will even lie about fast-tracking their babies. When new moms were asked if they regularly observed other mothers pushing their babies to learn academic skills at an age earlier than what is expected, more than 85 percent said they had, but only 33 percent admitted to doing so themselves. In marketing surveys, such a discrepancy usually indicates that interviewees are underreporting participation in activities they disapprove of. They don’t want to be, or to see themselves as being, aggressive Boomers, fast-tracking their infants’ education; they would prefer that educational products do the fast-tracking for them, albeit tacitly. Interestingly, this paradox has allowed companies to attract both Boomers and Generation X as customers. Market research shows that while the Gen-Xers are drawn in by the “learning is fun” line, Boomer grandparents are taken by the academic undertone. This is a coup, because grandparents are big spenders. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey, the fifty-five to sixty-four age group spends more per capita on toys than the twenty-five to forty-four age group.
BEFORE AND AFTER
Marketers have also learned to play on Gen-X parents’ abiding childhood fear of being left alone — a fear they go out of their way to avoid re-creating in their own children. Fisher-Price learned this the hard way in the early 1990s, when the first Gen-X women were becoming mothers. Marketers knew very little about their behavior and, frankly, did not register the significance of this emerging demographic. They did, however, know a great deal about Boomer moms, and most marketing efforts were concentrated on developing relationships with that group. Recent research had revealed that new mothers and fathers often clashed over who would attend to the crying baby in the middle of the night. Boomer mothers had complained of a fundamental inequity in parenting responsibilities. They were under enormous pressure to compete with men in the workplace, and to have to endure the lash of sexism at home seemed intolerable. The friction was stressing their self-esteem, their marriages, and their quality of life. If a company offered a product that would help solve this problem, mothers said they would buy it — and if it had some educational value, all the better.
These findings inspired Fisher-Price to develop a musical electronic mobile that could be activated by remote control. The TV ad created for the launch of the mobile was designed to dramatize the conflict and, of course, to portray the mobile as the solution. The spot opened with a husband and wife in bed, asleep. Then a baby’s wail is heard. The husband and wife awaken under a cloud of dark resentment and bicker groggily about who is going to attend to the baby. That marked the “Before” scenario. The “After” scenario returned to the same peacefully sleeping couple, but this time, when the baby wails, a hand reaches for the remote control and pushes a button. Without either parent having to rally to full consciousness, the mobile is activated, and the baby is shown cooing contentedly as a soothing lullaby calms her back to sleep. Husband and wife snuggle, blissfully dead to the world. Fisher-Price was pleased with the ad. The research was solid, the mobile was charming and practical, and the ad was funny and engaging. Before running it live, however, the marketing department presented it to a test market of new mothers.
The mothers did not like it — in fact, they couldn’t stand it. They were offended that a mother would be portrayed as so unfeeling. What kind of self-centered princess would lie in bed dickering over domestic duties when her baby was in distress? Was a little sleep so important to this woman that she would endanger her child’s sense of security? No, these mothers would not buy this electronic mobile. What could be more obnoxiously yuppie-ish than buying a gadget that would swap a mother’s love for convenience?
Fisher-Price marketing executives were astonished. Had they misinterpreted the findings of the market research? Where were all those women who had said they wanted an easy way out of power struggles with their husbands at two o’clock in the morning? The researchers retraced their steps, conducted additional interviews, and updated their files. Ultimately, they realized that their target mother had disappeared. In the interval between the initial research and the final ad, a massive demographic shift had occurred. Fisher-Price was meeting the new
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