Buy, Buy Baby: How Big Business Captures the Ultimate Consumer – Your Baby or Toddler. Susan Thomas Gregory
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 parents and children. Although Baby Boomers tend to see this practice as impractical and even indulgent, Gen-X parents embrace it to varying degrees.
Market research suggests that Gen-X mothers would rather err on the side of being too close, too involved, too loving. They hold themselves 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