Marketing to the Four-Eyed, Four-Legged Consumer: Mom & Kid

Editor’s Note: This article is excerpted from Marketing to the New Super Consumer Mom & Kid by Tim Coffey, Dave Siegel and Greg Livingston, principals of WonderGroup.

Moms have changed. They’re largely Gen-X. They’re smarter, college educated. They live for their children, not just their careers. They want to be the best moms ever. But, they’re also time starved; money starved and stressed trying to do it all!

Kids have changed. They’re savvier to marketing. They’re well informed and connected thanks to better schooling and the Internet. And, they’ve become consensual with moms, probably because mom is now pretty “cool” herself.

The inevitable result? Very smart moms, looking to avoid wasting valuable time and money have joined forces with their very savvy consumerized, informed and connected kids to make purchasing decisions as simple and as smart as possible. They have become one single consumer—a four eyed for legged consumer!

The nature of the Four-Eyed, Four-Legged™ consumer, which we'll refer to from now on as 4i4l, changes as the child matures from pre-birth (pregnancy) to teen. Today’s moms and, therefore, their children are substantially different than previous generations in their approach to life and parenting in particular. By examining their life stages, we can better understand how the 4i4l develops and changes over time. Each stage of the 4i4l brings a new relationship between mother and child that significantly affects the mode and nature of how they make decisions together, with each stage informing the next one. Most importantly, each stage requires a different approach to effectively market to the 4i4l consumer.

In relationship terms, we see three stages — Dependence, Conditional and Interdependence — which emerge over the life stages of the mother and child. Each stage is characterized by a different mix and balance of mutual decision-making styles. For the past several decades, the view of this decision-making relationship has been characterized as a nagging child who pesters and cajoles her parent to get what she wants, with the parent (mostly mom) represented as the “gatekeeper” who decides which requests are granted. While we are not saying that there is no truth in these characterizations, we have seen in our own and others’ research that there is much more to the story.

There is far more generational collaboration than once believed, as both mom and kid simultaneously seek to meet their respective needs. In our 2005 study of Mom/Kid Influence, we found clear evidence of this more collaborative relationship, even among moms and children as young as two to four years old, that increases as the child grows older. In fact, if a product or service is purchased for a child, moms tell us that the child is between eighty and ninety percent influential in the decision. Even if a purchase is made for the family (like a car or new home) the child is highly influential!