Buy, Buy Baby: How Big Business Captures the Ultimate Consumer – Your Baby or Toddler. Susan Thomas Gregory
in many cases the terms used to categorize developmental milestones suggest that little children will be learning academic subjects. For example, according to LeapFrog’s S&S, the twelve-month-old developmental milestones of shape recognition and perception of spatial relations fall under the heading “Geometry.” Also, a single developmental milestone often appears under several headings. Shape recognition, for example, turns up under “Early Reading” as well as “Geometry.” This semantic shift is striking. There is a substantial difference between using academic language for the sake of precision and using it to convey an academic objective. When asked about the rationale behind their choice of language, producers contend that the reasoning is not flawed in any fundamental way. Although it may not be literally accurate to characterize shape recognition as an example of the ability to formulate geometric proofs, they argue, it is legitimate to suggest that by mastering these developmental skills, infants and toddlers are building the foundation for grasping advanced mathematics later on. It seems odd, however, that after identifying developmental skills with such precise academic terms, producers would then shift to loose, bendy language in categorizing them. What’s going on?
THE “LEARNING” LINE
Producers admit that one of the larger purposes of the S&S is to establish a curriculum for infants and toddlers, one that LeapFrog hopes might ultimately serve as a government-sanctioned standard. Since President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which compels public schools to comply with specified academic standards, even state pre-K programs have been obliged to conform to standards published by the states’ departments of education. Teachers and heads of schools must painstakingly comb through book-length guidelines and cross-reference them with their teaching plans to make certain they are in compliance.
At the 2004 annual conference of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), in Anaheim, California, an entire track of speeches and seminars was devoted to complying with standards without sacrificing young children’s developmental need for play. But even as such seminars were under way in the conference rooms, the main exhibit hall was lined with booths of companies marketing prepackaged preschool curricula, reflecting the big business that has bubbled up since passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. Now the standards-based trend is beginning to trickle down to even lower ages. Over the past few years, the daycare industry has begun to feel pressure to offer parents some assurance that their infants and toddlers will be prepared for preschool. LeapFrog spokespeople explain that this situation offers the company a strategic opportunity. Through its School-house Division, LeapFrog already sells LeapPads and other products to kindergartens and elementary schools. If LeapFrog can create and standardize a curriculum for babies and toddlers, the company will be in an excellent position to market products in large volume directly to daycare centers. LeapFrog already has a substantial foothold in the daycare business. Its parent company, Knowledge Learning Corporation — owned by the erstwhile junk-bond trader Michael Milken — completed mergers with the nation’s two largest daycare chains, Children’s World and KinderCare, in 2005. Today the company operates in thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia, with nearly 2,000 daycare centers, over 500 school partnership sites, and more than 120 corporate daycare centers.
The S&S also serves several other functions. Every time a new product goes into prototype, producers check off the skills it supports on the S&S grid. They consult the S&S during brainstorming to see what has been checked off and where the holes are; holes represent opportunities for new products. But before moving forward with a concept based on these holes, producers consult with LeapFrog’s focus-group researchers to find out what mothers have been saying. In the world of the zero- to three-year-old, mom is the primary consumer, and today’s mom is well aware that very young children are far from blank slates, that they are capable of learning a great deal.
However, today’s mom is also wary of fast-tracking her little ones. For example, LeapFrog’s market research department noted that many mothers wanted to start a comforting, nurturing bedtime reading routine with their infants and toddlers. Producers consulted the S&S, and the ensuing marriage of these two varieties of research resulted in the Touch and Tug Discovery Book, an electronic toy that straps on to the side of a crib and can also be detached and used as an “interactive book”; a recorded voice reads stories and, according to the enclosed pamphlet, “When playtime is over, the included soothing music and lullabies are an excellent way to calm baby as he drifts to sleep.”
Mothers also told researchers that they wanted to introduce their children to music, which they knew was important developmentally. But any product linked with classical music — particularly Mozart — would make them feel that they were trying too hard to turn their babies into geniuses. It wouldn’t make learning feel like fun. After consulting the S&S, producers came up with the Learn & Groove Activity Station, which features a rotating plastic disco ball and a toy version of a rap-era turntable — both artifacts of Mom’s own early childhood, when the Bee Gees ruled on radio, and, later, of a Grandmaster Flash–era adolescence.
LeapFrog has learned that “learning” must feel like fun. The company identifies itself as a maker not of “educational” or “developmental” toys but of “learning” toys. While there is only a shade of semantic difference in that distinction, it is a significant difference in marketing terms. Producers and executives at LeapFrog, like their competitors, say that the term “educational” harkens back to the achievement-driven yuppie era of the 1980s, when a child’s every moment was pegged to education as insurance for present and future success. Then children were treated as glum receptacles into which “education” was poured. The present generation of parents responds much more favorably to the term “learning,” which suggests that the child brings her own active agency to the experience rather than having it foisted upon her. To this generation of mothers, “learning” connotes an enjoyable, nurturing, or natural experience unobtrusively infused with some underlying lesson.
Steering clear of the stigma of the ’80s and early ’90s parenting style — that of the Baby Boomers — is very important to LeapFrog. Today’s mothers are put off by anything that overtly smacks of academic fast-tracking. So the S&S has yet another function: mapping the mind of the Generation-X mom. In that capacity the S&S may be one of the company’s most valuable assets.
AS DAVE SIEGEL, the president of WonderGroup, a marketing firm, steps onto the stage, the lights dim inside Ballroom A at the Disney Yacht Club Resort’s conference center in Orlando. With the click of his laptop keypad, Siegel activates a PowerPoint presentation. On the giant screen to his left, a photograph appears: a grimacing, gun-slinging woman, a cowboy hat cocked back on her head. Underneath her picture is the legend THERE’S A NEW MOM IN TOWN. The room echoes with the whistling theme song of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The audience shudders with nervous laughter.
It is May 2004, and Siegel is giving the keynote talk at Kid Power Xchange, the country’s foremost kids’ marketing conference, which is held annually in Disney World’s capital city. Every year hundreds of marketing executives from companies ranging from Benjamin Moore Paints to PepsiCo to Disney itself — as well as Strottman International, Logistix Kids, KidShop, the Geppetto Group, S.T.A.R.S. for Kidz, the Kaleidoscope Group, and Eventive Marketing — gather here to network with peers and potential clients and learn about new strategies for marketing to children. One of their perennial challenges is working with the mothers of those children — or “getting around the gatekeeper.” Until recently, many marketers say they enjoyed an all but industry-wide field day with Baby Boomer moms. These mothers felt so guilty about being career-focused that they often did not have the emotional wherewithal to say no to their kids; as a result, marketing practices went largely unchecked. But the Boomers are now becoming grandparents, and as Siegel’s presentation confirms, there is a new mom in town who categorically rejects the Boomer mom’s MO. To illustrate this contrast, Siegel projects In and Out lists on the screen, to scattered groans from the floor. As he clicks through his slides, the following