Moms on the Move

- August 10, 2010 by Tim Craig

Every marketer wants to reach the primary decision maker in the modern household. But before you can sell to moms, you've got to understand them. Here we share the results of our extensive anthropological study on the daily lives of moms and what it reveals about communicating to them in the marketplace and workplace. 

If you'd like a copy, you can download this whitepaper as a pdf.

Executive Summary

A common characteristic shared by all mothers is the obligation of multi-tasking, whether they like it or not. Some are better at it than others, but all of them have to do it. As more and more mothers are entering the workforce today, the ability to multi-task efficiently and effectively becomes much more important. From maintaining a household and juggling multiple children’s school and extracurricular activity schedules to forty-hour workweeks and executive deadlines, moms are extremely active people. While many moms are maintaining a household and contributing to their annual household income (HHI), on the purchasing side, “Women don’t just influence the buys—they control it.”1 As such, moms are seriously impacting the workplace and consumer marketplace in myriad ways.

This whitepaper is an examination of mothers and their day-to-day lives. The primary objective? To discover what and how working and non-working moms are thinking, feeling, doing, buying, enjoying, disliking, working on, communicating, interacting, sharing and so on. While broad in scope, the goal is to obtain an enhanced understanding of mothers’ lives from multiple vantage points to identify key patterns found amongst them. Secondary objectives include:

• To obtain an understanding of a typical mom's day
• To discover how moms are interacting in the workplace today 
• To discover how moms are impacting the retail marketplace today 
• To reveal how the workplace/marketplace can communicate with moms as workers/consumers

This study is the culmination of three separate but synergistically connected research projects that inquired about the various experiences moms (working and non-working) encounter on a daily basis. The study utilized a hybrid methodological model where online surveys and deep-dive interviews were conducted with a non-random sample of individuals who visit a popular website among moms, as well as recipients of the website’s newsletter. The initial online user survey returned 212 responses that led to a second deep-dive study where 11 individuals were interviewed for an average time of 1.5 hours each. The final online deep-dive survey received 55 responses. Since the data are based on a non-random sample, a margin of error cannot be computed, and the results are not projectable to any population beyond those in this sample. Below are the demographic details for the initial survey study, of which all participants are a part:

• 100% female, married and/or divorced with at least one child
• Age range: 23 to 67 years old with a mean age of 38.5
• Geographic reach: throughout the United States
• Ethnicity: N/A – multiple 
• Education level: 48% hold at least a Bachelor's degree and 28% hold a Graduate degree (M.A., Ph.D., other) for a combined 76% with a Bachelor's degree or higher
• Household income: approximately 71% earn over $61,000/year, including 22% who earn over $90,000/year and 25% who earn over $120,000/year
• Employment: 81% employed either full-time or part-time

Chart 1: Employment Status

1. Frazier, Mya. The Reality of the Working Woman: Her Impact on the Female Target Beyond Consumption. Ad Age Insights, White Paper, Sponsored by Meredith. June 7, 2010.

We'd put the whole whitepaper here, but then you'd be scrolling for a while. Instead, download this whitepaper as a pdf.