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Buy Buy Baby (the book, not the store)
Just finished Susan Gregory Thomas's book Buy Buy Baby
A couple of personal favorites:
The Gepetto Group, a marketing firm that target kids from age 0, hosts an annual scavenger hunt at Walt Disney World. This isn't your typical party game, though—the "items" being hunted are kids. Participants—budding marketing pros—spend the day observing toddlers and their moms as an exercise in "kid immersion."
Though some participants feel uncomfortable with the exercise at first, they come to see it as harmless, even beneficial. Rachel Geller, chief strategic officer of the Gepetto Group, reassured participants in the 2005 scavenger hunt by stating, " It's good for kids to learn how to manipulate (people)—that's how you get ahead in this world."
WonderGroup, a kid-targeting firm, created the "Millennium Mom Segmentation Model" to rank moms by permissiveness. According to the model about 40 percent of moms are one of three groups of "permissives;" the other 60 percent are divided into three "restrictive" segments. The R3S segment, for example, has a "low response to kid requests," is the "most educated" group and has a "family focus." At a talk.... President of WonderGroup described the R3S mom as "the evil twin sister of P3... and, dare I say...a bitch?"
Not that Thomas allows all the blame to fall squarely on the shoulders of the marketers. Much of the book focuses on baby television and on the self-centered logic of gen x moms who have embraced it. Far from representing an enlightened elite, educated and affluent moms are some of the biggest chumps of all. As Thomas points out, a common marketing strategy is to first target this "class" group so that the product trickles down to the "mass" group with an educational halo. This, basically, is what happened with Baby Einstein and its ilk—a potentially harmful class of goods that parents have uncritically embraced.
Anyway, there's a lot of good stuff here, but I'll save a couple of other items for future posts.
Posted by carrie on 11/08/2007 | Permalink
Comments
I was all set to never purchase one of those Baby Einstein vids, but my son ended up seeing their "water" video and absolutely loved it. Frankly, I found it ungodly boring, but I guess footage of a guy feeding fish in an aquarium tank for 25 minutes while Debussy plays isn't all that bad in the long run. The trick is making sure you do OTHER things with your kids as well, and telling them up-front that much of TV is just a big shuck to get them to buy things.
Posted by: DaveX | Nov 10, 2007 4:06:18 PM
One reason Baby Einstein videos are so popular is because babies love to watch them. I'm sure these tots would love to eat pixie sticks for dinner, too, but that doesn't make it good for him.
Commercialism is by no means the only problem with television. For babies, the issue has more to do with what all that electronic stimulation does to developing brains. To date, no serious research has shown benefit to video for under 2, and a few studies have found harmful effects (namely, attention disorders).
Posted by: carrie | Nov 10, 2007 5:28:44 PM
And on a separate note, regardless of whether Baby Einstein videos are actually bad for your baby it is certain that they aren't good for your baby despite the overzealous claims of the producers.
I'm sure that every parent probably needs a distraction for their kid sometimes, but a lot of parents are buying into the idea that the distraction is good for the kid instead of for the parent. Once that happens, essentially useless (and possibly harmful) baby videos become "education time for Timmy" instead of "unwinding time for Mommy and Daddy" and the problems of marketing baby videos as educational become clear.
Posted by: Charles | Nov 11, 2007 12:13:38 PM
