CPGs Taking Clues from Mom Life
It’s no surprise or any kind of epiphany that consumer package goods companies follow the lead of what its primary customers need and want. It’s a duh, I know. Every CPG I’ve ever worked with has female purchasers at the top of their target lists — complete with massive efforts like that of the WalMart Moms and the 1:1 online targeting from P&G and J&J. It seems than any company with an ampersand knows how important it is to target moms online. Marketing to moms is compelling, but its the history of moms directing the goods that fascinates me.
Last weekend I made brunch for a friend’s 40th birthday. I found a Sunset Magazine from the month he was born: August 1970. I was ready for quiche recipes, maybe some heavy sauces, I could slow roast or even make fondue. I was wrong. What I found was a clue to the way women’s changing lives 40 years ago shaped the future of the consumer packaged goods industry.
In the early 1970s, the Women’s Movement had moved from the Mad Men phase into a wide, strong, changing world, led by some of my icons that I was lucky enough to meet, including Betty Friedan and Shirley Chisholm. As middle-class women aggressively hit the workforce, consumer packaged goods had to scramble to modify their products in order to shift focus from June Cleaver to June Sells Cleavers for Equal Pay.
“I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan, and never let you forget you’re a man, because I’m a woman, W.O.M.A.N., ” sang Peggy Lee (and Miss Piggy). And indeed they could. But quick frying bacon would have been helpful. Oh, and a microwave. Women needed food that was economical with a quick prep time. These working women still had their homemaker duties in full-swing. The food industry needed to respond to the change. Food companies catapulted themselves into the new focus of low prep meals including the launch of Hamburger Helper, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, Betty Crocker ready-to-eat pudding and the “new” fad of instant iced tea mix. Instantly, meals were on the table — and along with it, the children of America began eating processed foods with staggering growth.
Four decades later, the Hamburger HelpHER revolution has resulted in the widely known epidemic of both childhood and adult obesity. Was it the price that parents paid for the women’s movement? Maybe.
The same revolution is happening now at a great and growing pace. Companies are sporting nutrition for children that are actually — stop, gasp — nutritious. Children are being taught at an early age about the importance and ramifications of their diets; and, surprisingly, being given the power to make many of these choices on their own. Ask my kids if they want mac ‘n’cheese and they’ll always say yes, but it’s Annie Mac n’ Cheese, nothing powdered, and, they’ll tell you they are eating carbohydrates, fat and dairy. Give them a chance and they’ll tell you their favorite “superfoods” (blueberries for her, broccoli for him).
I saw savvy, educated kids in action at a Cliff/Luna Bar event in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. The kids spent time planting home gardens, showing off yoga poses and sharing food knowledge. They listened intently, but they listened with the intensity of agreement, not that of learning something new. I chatted with the Cliff lead nutritionist who came with LapTop lunch boxes for kids to decorate and talked about their commitment to healthy quick food. The consumer packaged goods companies are at it again: reaching us where we need them to. We all aspire to live the Cliff/Luna lifestyle of sports, food, fun and giving.
My life as a working mom means butt-busting, speed-of-light work around the clock. It means I, like June Cleaver, have a responsibility to put food on my family table. But I want more than that: I want it to feed us, not just put food in our stomachs. The influence of women on the food industry in the 70s leaves a legacy of quick rising yeast, instant hot chocolate, Bisquick and J-ello. What is the legacy that we, as mothers in 2010,will leave on the food industry?
I was not paid for any marketing or promotion of materials or goods for any company listed above. I did, however, have a great day with the women from Cliff/Luna and ate a casesar wrap and one (okay, two) oatmeal rasin moonpies.
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Scheduling Freak
Some people call me the Sleep Nazi. Others call me the Schedule Freak. Call me what you want, I’ve got the magic trick to getting kids (well, at least mine), to adapt to school easily.
Maybe you’ve read all the how-to books. You’ve mastered The Happiest Baby in the Condo Complex or whatever. You’ve changed sleep habits and Tivo’d SuperNanny. Do what you want. I’ve got your ticket to kids being ripe for transition. How did I get so smart? Dora the Fricking Explorer. Seriously. And even today, five years after I have even laid my eyes on Dora, my kids will go back to school with the same tricks I’ve used all these years. Watch me as I head back into my alter ego: The Schedule Freak.
Here is the Dora magic (and hellno, I am not a Dora representative, fan or even particularly fond of the show). Dora tells things in threes, Dora repeats the tasks, Dora has rewards at the end, Dora includes the children in the journey. Dora sets expectations. Dora is more of a scheduling freak then I am: ”Big Tree. Wide River. Magic Forrest!” Not only does the character tell things in threes, she’s super clever in that she repeats what has been done, so there is accomplishment throughout the journey. “We’ve climbed the big tree — now we need to find the Wide River to get to the Magic Forrest!” This repetition is enough to drive a parent crazy. Until, you can use that chubby little four-year-old to your benefit.
I started with simple stuff when the kids were about 3-years-old: ”First we’re going to the post office to send mail! Then we’re going to the grocery store to find fresh fruit! Then we’ll come home and make dinner!” I realized an immediate difference. The kids were invested in the process and loved the idea of being included. There were no secrets, certain conclusions and full knowledge that they wouldn’t be sitting endlessly in their carseats. Their tasks had a purpose. Shazam!
As they grew a bit older, I worked up to more complex rhythms: “First we’re going to get dressed, then we’re going to see grandma and then we’ll have lunch at the park.” The rhythms were more vague (get dressed means teeth brushing, clothes, hair, shoes) but the final task was always a reward (free time). The game still worked.
By school age, the kids craved the patterns: “We’re going to have breakfast, get dressed and go to school,” soon morphed into “We’re going to do our morning thing (breakfast, getting dressed, brushing teeth, hair shoes, etc.), then we’re going to school (six hours of tasks), and then mommy will pick you up.” My children never spent one day afraid of school — they knew what came next. Call it kid empowerment, call it transparency. I call it Doraisms.
Today the Dora rhythm is still in-play at our home. The key to Dora-esque scheduling of kids and grownups like them:
1. Use a wide angle lens. Let the kids know what is happening in the big picture. We have a dry erase calendar and as they eat breakfast and dinner, they look at the calendar to know what’s going on around them. They count down just like Dora does. “Five days until we sleep over at Aunty’s house.”
2. Give them a Daily Dose. I let my kids know the schedule as it unfolds each day. They can not only depend on their schedule, but also trust that their needs will be met. If it’s a school day it works like this:
7 a.m. Wake up, cuddle time (15 minutes), no TV or videos
7:30 a.m. To the kitchen for breakfast and morning chat about daily expectations
8 a.m. Brush teeth, get dressed, brush hair, find your way to the front door for shoes and backpacks.
8:30 a.m. Leave for school
2:50 p.m. Mommy, La Gringa, Grandma or Aunty/Uncle pick you up. No exceptions, no disappointment (Dora doesn’t say, “Oh, go with the Grumpy Old Troll because mommy has a conference call)
3:30 p.m. Home, wash hands, change clothes.
3:45 p.m. Snack, homework
4:30 p.m. Play
6 p.m. Shower, jammies, cuddles
6:30 p.m. Dinner
7 p.m. Read with @La_Gringa
7:30 p.m. Lights out
3. Give them some Wiggle Room. Adding in spontaneity is key to a highly scheduled kid. My kids live and breathe their schedule, but they know if I tell them, “Today we’re going to chill out,” they will get more creative. This third part is vital to the life of a scheduled child: NO SCHEDULE. The entire reason to schedule my kids is so that I can break the schedule. The ability for my kids to adapt is important to me. I am learning daily how to make sure there is enough wiggle room for the kids to drive their own Doraisms.
As the back-to-school frenzy begins, I find myself happier than much of the unscheduled summertime. The kids knew their patterns for today and followed them beautifully. They wiggled-in an hour of four square, I squeezed in a quick trip to the fish market. In watching my children’s growth, I have come to understand that the Dora scheduling philosophy might have set patterns for my family that are so much greater than I ever imaged. Setting the patterns clearly, the goals cleanly and the success certain are the keys to Dora’s trove of wisdom that I hold so dear.
This post is for the topic of Back to School from my dear friends at the Yahoo! MotherBoard.
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Cardboard Cutout Grandma
My kids are fed up. They’re sick of both of their grandmas being sick. Their sick of us being sick of it. They’re sick of changes in schedule, flip-flopping of plans, and modifying just about everything. They don’t like it. They hate it. And they’ve decided to replace their grandmothers with a lifesize cardboard cutout.
This late-night announcement came just hours after Grandma J’s lung cancer surgery and minutes after Grandma’s decision to delay her Alaskan cruise scheduled for today. This of course means that the kids couldn’t go on the giant cruise ship for a tour — this grandma sick business is really cutting into their summer fun.
Our moms are both sick. @La_Gringa’s mom had a cancerous tumor cut from her right lung yesterday — a horrifying orderal that’s gone on for over a year. Despite crap-house stats for lung cancer, Grandma J. looks to beat the odds with a very early stage tumor and extremely good overall health. But yesterday, during the five-hour surgical procedure, it sure didn’t feel like the good news that it is. It felt like hell for the entire family. And although kids are clueless sometimes, it was hard to miss the frightening undertone from the past several months. They sense that something is out of kilter, even if they can’t put their finger on it.
My mom is doing better, but not better enough to be better enough to travel. Complications from CIDP, Lupus, Hepatitis and skin cancer are messing with her vital organs and she can’t risk being away from medical care if things dip, even slightly. Just 16 hours before departing for a week-long cruise, the doctor pulled the plug. Mother fricker. The blows just keep coming.
The kids don’t care about the wheelchair or Grandma’s ballooned-up face. Really they don’t. But it does affect them, “I am sick of my grandma being sick,” Thing 2 said while waiting for her pasta to arrive yesterday. “I’m hungry and dont’ want to talk about this,” replied Thing 1. Ah, the female-male dynamic of managing crisis. They went on later to tell me they wish they could make a life-size cardboard cutout of their grandmas and carry them around doing all the normal stuff they are used to doing. Convinced that they could still visit the cruise ship, they schemed how to make a cardboard replacement for grandma. “What’s the difference? We can put the fake grandma in a wheelchair and just roll her up the plank to the ship.” The planning went on and on until I chimed in:
You can make a fake grandma and take her anywhere you want, but your real grandma will still be here waiting to do it herself.
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The Safety Dance
Yesterday a slew kids were playing on their teacher’s computer during summer camp — one of them called out “FACEBOOK!” To the poor teacher’s horror, her FB page had popped up, photos and Wall posts and all, simply as the result of a kid clicking around on her browser. Ugh. The afternoon was filled with fits of laughter from kids screaming, “Maestra has a FACEBOOK PAGE!,” to the hum of nan-er-nan-er-nan-er.
Now, I’m not a super security freak when it comes to online safety for my kids. La Gringa and I have worked building, managing and monetizing online communities as long as they’ve been around. (She didn’t get the name Yahoo! Sheriff for nothing.) All along, we’ve had a simple philosophy: teach the kids to utilize the web properly and we won’t have to use security measures to block out content. We put rules in place: browse the web at-will, but you must (a) use your laptop in a public place in the house (b) you may not watch video of any kind (c) you may not click on an ad of any kind (d) you may not speak with someone online of any kind with the exception of sites like Club Penguin that we trust for kid-centric communication.
You are freaking out, aren’t you? I bet you are. And so did my friends at BitDefender. And so did some moms in Chicago who sat shocked as I told tales of not using parental controls on my kids’ computers. Just hear me out.
I want to teach my children to understand fully what the power of the Internet means. I want them to learn to scope out dangers, understand potential hazards and learn to manage risks online. I am convinced that my children are smarter than I, and will figure out any barriers to entry I put before them to keep them from online dangers. We as a family decided to face the fears, point out the dangers and teach our children to respond appropriately to them. I am right there with my children when they call out, “Mom, a pop-up ad! Mom, they are selling me something! Mom, look!” And I do, I look and show them the little X box at the top to remove the ad, and we discuss what they did to get to the place online where they’d be subjected to such things (Sports Illustrated is famous in our house, as you can imagine).
One major pitfall for us has been Search. I’m beginning to understand that Search is wildly imperfect and that despite Yahoo! Search being a default on my kids’ computers, it does have danger. They are old enough to spell and type in the search bar for terms; however, they are not mature enough to know what results pages can render. And 6-year-olds misspell often. So a search on C3PO (Star Wars is an obsession in our home), can result in a kid typing just “C3″ which results in Cleveland Communities for Christ. Fine, right? Not so fast, it actually links to a Facebook Fan page which in turn links to photos, people and more. An easy search on my son’s version of spelling “Korea” came up with results for “Karreena,” a sultry, scantily dressed Bollywood actress. Clearly, my Learning Through Transparency model doesn’t work for search.
I continue to push back against over controlling my children’s presence online. I want them to learn rights, wrongs and potential dangers online. If I constrict their web so intensely, I worry that they’ll explode with obsession when they learn that their version of the web has been so small, so protected, so unrealistic. At the same time, I am learning, day by day, that there are pitfalls to this philosophy and as my children age, the needle will have to move on just how wide I let them explore.
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Stop and Go
All hell has been breaking loose for a few months now. As most of you know from my posts at SV Moms, I’m pretty open about most of my life and it’s awesomeness and even crappiness, at times, but not this. This is just personal and hard.
Every morning for four months, I wake up wondering how, and if, my mom will wake up today. My mom is really fucking sick. And, truth be told, she really is the only thing that matters to me minute-to-minute right now. My life is on automatic-pilot. I get done what I have to get done and go where I should and do what I should at the bare minimum I can do it. Everything is stopped.
My mom doesn’t have a disease you’ve ever heard of and there aren’t really any cool races you can do to donate money for a cure. There’s not a t-shirt or a fund, there isn’t a sparkly skirt to wear in her honor. It’s not cancer where everyone knows someone who has it. It’s a lonely, mean, shithouse disease called Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating PolyNeuropathy, an unpredictable disease that attacks the body at-will. One day you might walk, the next, you are bound to a wheelchair. For hell’s sake, she was *just* dancing at my brother’s wedding six months ago.
Everything in our world has come to a stopping point. That is, until last weekend.
Last weekend I joined a group of 12 mom bloggers for a 200-mile run from Napa Valley to Santa Cruz. We’re not talking diapers-and-cheerios-type moms, we’re talking serious female writers who are on the forefront of a leading influential industry. As exciting as the run sounded, by the time I made it to the team dinner, I was convinced that I’d made a huge mistake. I truly didn’t feel it was wise to leave my family. It’s just not a good time.
We left for Napa in the wee hours of the morning, and by the time @la_gringa set off for the first leg of our two-day journey, I understood that it wasn’t only a good time to be doing this race, it was The Time to be doing this race. It hit me that the Universe had given me these specific women, during this specific weekend, for a specific reason: they were here to let me GO.
And Go, I did. I ran four legs totalling 17.2 miles in 30-something hours at a pace of about 9:50. Every time I’d hop back in the van, I wanted to hug every single team member. They didn’t know the immense gifts they were giving me by the moment. They teased me about my runner’s high — every tree, person, view from the third row of the GMC van was more beautiful than the next. But, it wasn’t the endorphins at all, it was the joy of being in-motion. I’ve done a lot of racing in my time, every po-dunk 5k, four marathons, a haphazard 31-miler and dozens of 1/2 marathons. Each race comes with something special, but this one was different, it wasn’t a race I ran, instead, it was a freedom to run when my mom cannot walk. A freedom to GO when my whole world is STOPPED.
I’ve been home from the race for two days. Mom was admitted to the hospital this morning. She’s not well. It’s not good. As I pack up to head over to the hospital for the umpteenth time this afternoon, I take with me new gifts of GO. From my Heather, the ability to laugh through this; from Marie the excitement of working things out; from Christine the ability to steadily put one foot in front of the other to get to tomorrow; from Linsey the wisdom to walk, not run the toughest of hills; from Jane the subtle ability to stay-the-course even on the windy road; from Van 2, that lying under the stars can inspire; and from my dear @la_gringa the reminder to put my shoulders back (or in, as the case might be) and keep GOing.
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If I… Were Mayor of Willow Glen
Oh, to live in Silicon Valley where the people are smart and the wine is good; to live near brainy outdoorsy people with a passion for technology; to be surrounded by people who want everything from their socks to their spouses to be organic and free-range. To live in a town alive and busteling. Er, scratch that last part. In the past five years, I’ve watched my town, hit hard by recession and overlords, fall to the bare bones of small town business. It’s not that we’re without hope, we’re full of hope, but we’re also full of economic fear, distrust in our landowners and, most of all, frustrated by the very community we love to be a part of.
If I was the mayor of Willow Glen (not that we have one), I’d:
* Create a 3×3 Program. Loyalty is tough when finances are challenged. Everyone wants a deal, and I get that. I shop at Costco for my TP just like everyone else, but we, as a local community, from the leaders to the laypeople can participate in a one-year 3×3 program. The idea is to shop at three Willow Glen businesses three times per week. For me that would mean going to WG Coffee Roasting for my coffee a couple times, picking up a birthday card at Fleurish, getting a birthday gift at Treehouse in the Glen, meeting a friend at The Grapevine for a drink and getting takeout from Juquilita’s taqueria. It’s not hard, right? And how does this happen? People get 3×3 cards, get stamped when you hit each destination. After being a 3x3er 3 times, you get couponed for exclusive 30% off savings at a local store. Incentivize customers with 3×3 promos in town.
* Give the landowners a solid smack on the ass. It is one thing to treat business like business. It’s another to take down an entire community of small businesses owners during a recession and opt for empty store after store in lieu of short-term lease modifications. It’s important to stand your ground, make your money and be a true capitalist. But be an opportunist too. Give worthy businesses one-year lease bridges that allow for them to stay in business while you still can pay your land fees. Call it charity, call it community building, call the press, make your company full of capital and power also the company of the community. Let the retailers and leasers be your evangelists and in return, get more than rent, get loyal customers for life. Why? Because you were with them when the chips were down. Because you are part of Willow Glen. Because Willow Glen is a part of you.
* Get two anchor stores, one on either end of Lincoln Avenue. After my Go Local mantra, you’re wondering why I’d be pitching Big Business in our small town community. It’s the economy, stupid, as LeBush once said. We need to anchor our town with appropriate anchor stores that are designed to weather economic times and have the wiggle room to stand side-by-side with competitors. Los Gatos just added a JCrew. We need something like that here. Anthropologie ? Banana Republic? I’m not talking Target, here, I’m talking highly customizable corporate entities. I’d bet my comfy suburban house that an anchor store would bring more business to our local mom-and-pop shops.
* Fire the WG Business Association. Now this is going to get me in trouble. I don’t mean to be political; truly I don’t even get the politics in Willow Glen. The business association acts as a dysfunctional representative of the businesses in our town and worse, lacks understanding of what the people that shop at said businesses need. The business association should be experts at helping bridge the gaps between the two entities. I’d scratch the whole thing, fire everyone. Then I’d hire my buddy G to run it. G is a small business expert, an honest guy, a community organizer and certainly politically savvy enough to never write this post. With that, I’d create an organization joint-run by people and businesses, I’d the WG Elist for extremely valuable Community Recommendations (and only that), and I’d be on the frigging street talking to the community every single day in an endless effort to keep business flowing in our town. I’d create a Business Association that was of distinct and clear value to the community it serves.
There is a place in community building that involves loyalty, two-way communication and mutual respect. If I were Mayor of Willow Glen, I’d work my damnedest to cultivate all three. Bummer, there’s no such thing as Mayor of Willow Glen. We’ll have to leave the community building up to ourselves.
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Side Gigs
