10 Ways to Make Mom Buy

Moms spend much more money that Dads do. More than 2 trillion (with a ‘T’) dollars a year! That’s a darned lucrative market, so it’s one with a hefty amount of psychologizing put into it by Madison Avenue when they’re designing ad campaigns.

Now, there are people out there who will insist that the target audience for all this marketing is children, and many psychologists insist that advertising targeting children is unethical. Not that ethics counts for very much when there’s trillions of dollars on the table, of course. Deal is, children don’t work for a living, thus have little money to spend on all those expensive, questionably useful consumer items they’re being sold. The person who is REALLY being targeted is Mom. The marketers are just adding to the marketing appeal by enlisting children to do their work for them!

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Filed under Child-Parent Relationships, Family Life, Marketing to Kids, Nutrition, Relational Stress, Research | Comment (0)

Guitar Greg and Cool Ass Mojo

Trial by Baby Naming

My younger daughter and her husband visited this past weekend from Indianapolis. She’s into her 4th month of pregnancy (her first), just getting over the serious morning sickness phase, needed some Mom-time. Which I was of course delighted to lavish on her, sympathizing with her queazy stomach and re-arranging innards, happy to whip up some colorful stir-fry, hummus, falafel and tabouli for pita sandwiches, anything that sounded good, that she thought she might be able to keep down.

She’s never been a happy morning person, so when her hubby mentioned how hard the last few months have been – a strain on their relationship as well as their income since they work together out of home – I wasn’t very sympathetic. Grandpa could take care of that chore. And he did.

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Filed under Baby Names, Family Planning, Healthy Babies, Mom-Time, Pregnancy, Relational Stress | Comments (5)