The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

Blogging

Babycarrying and Online Marketing

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I suspect more than a few folks are scratching their heads about the whole #motrinmoms scandal du weekend. As my friend @fuzheado said, the divergence in reaction might make a good Mars/Venus case study. He didn’t get what all the fuss was about, but his wife honed right in on the problem.

Not surprisingly, I’m with the wife. Like the super-vocal moms who took such offense, I immediately “got” the problem with the ad — its tone. As a mom with a 5-month-old, I “wear” my baby all the time. But it’s not because it’s “in fashion,” because it’s “supposedly” is a good bonding experience or because I want to look like “an official mom”, as the Motrin ad implies. It’s because it works. The kid doesn’t cry and I can do whatever needs doing. And of course it’s a bonding experience, because any time you meet your child’s needs that’s the case.

And, yes, sometimes my back hurts. Others out there are admitting this, too, even though the conventional wisdom is that babywearing doesn’t hurt if you’re doing it right. So, I don’t think J&J is far off in targeting moms who wear their babies. They’re just going about it wrong. (And let’s not dismiss this as a Twitter crisis. For everyone that’s tweeting about this, there are many others that are hearing about it, or just seeing the ads themselves and having the same reaction. Twitter is just surfacing the word-of-mouth that would have been happening anyway. )

But all is not lost for the brand. Right now, everyone’s saying they will boycott Motrin. This bodes ill for their product for adults and may also impact their product for kids, given they’ve now offended the target that controls the purse-strings.

The silver lining is that Motrin has gotten everyone’s attention. They need to grab this opportunity, while they’re in the online spotlight, to connect in a positive way. They need to apologize and retool their condescending message about babywearing. To make sure it gets seen, an ad spend on mommy blogs is in order. Motrin have shown that they’re not the experts on babywearing, but they can certainly get involved with and sponsor conversations on the topic — a topic that inspires an amazing amount of passion. Whaddaya say, J&J?

Other links:

Sarah Evans on Mashable has a prescription for Motrin, as well.

Study: Pregnant Women and New Moms Chat It Up Online

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With action in Canada around Bisphenol A, the last few days have been hopping with online activity among parents — parents worried about the safety of plastics their kids are using; parents looking for information and products that will help them avoid this threat to their children’s health. From what I’ve been observing, most of the discussions are taking place on sites like Z Recommends — a “mom and pop”-type blog, not affiliated with any major media company — where the information in the comments are as valuable as the posts themselves.

This is the phenomenon documented in a BabyCenter/Keller Fay study released today, which finds that pregnant women and new moms engage in 1/3 more word-of-mouth conversations than other women, and 2/3 of those conversations involve product recommendations. Though the study found that most of the conversations happened in person, the Internet was the #1 driver of word-of-mouth among media.

Stuff like this is one reason I’m so jazzed to work with the highly-influential authors in our BabyCenter Parenting Federation (which FM runs in partnership with BabyCenter). Well, there’s that and the fact that I’m both pregnant and a new mom myself, so I personally love immersing myself in this world. Luckily for me (and marketers), the folks in this world are making tons of buying decisions (and having lively conversations about these decisions) every day.

Going to SXSW

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After all these years, I’m finally getting the chance to re-visit one of my favorite towns — where I did my undergraduate degree — and I’m thrilled to be attending SXSW Interactive for the first time. Yippee! So, if you’ll be there, too, let me know.

BlogHer, Day 1

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So, if I don’t get inspired to blog here at BlogHer, I probably never will. Hmm…

What’s amazing to me — and, I suppose this reflects what BlogHer was supposed to be about, in the first place — is how broad and diverse the blogging world is. And this is largely just the female side. So heartening, really. And it’s so pleasant, and unusual, to be in such a huge group in which the standard introductory line is “what do you blog about?” This when the typical blog-related conversation with a “normal” person begins with “you know what a blog is, right?”

It’s obvious it’s my first BlogHer, isn’t it?