Buy, Buy Baby: How Big Business Captures the Ultimate Consumer – Your Baby or Toddler. Susan Thomas Gregory
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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