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Shrinks and con men
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[02/25/00]

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By Beth Broeker
[02/24/00]

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Traditionally, advertising geared toward mothers has been watered down to appeal to broad marketing stereotypes such as "Supermoms" or "Happy Homemakers." As established categories readily accepted in consumer circles, they were easy to keep using -- until recently.

Also Today The family for sale We take a week to examine the ravenous commercial forces that prey on us each day. By Jennifer Foote Sweeney   Shrinks and con men The unholy alliance that targets kiddie consumers. By Arthur Allen

Motherhood is now being acknowledged as a package that requires more diverse wrapping than the history of advertising might suggest, according to Denise Fedewa, a vice president and planning director at Leo Burnett, one of the world's largest advertising firms. As part of LeoShe, a team at Leo Burnett that profiles women to find out what kind of marketing messages prompt them to get out their wallets, Fedewa says that mothers, like any other consumer group, are now defined not just by motherhood, but by income, age, upbringing, employment and marital status.

Ignoring the complexity of motherhood is not only offensive to women, says Fedewa, it's also detrimental to the advertiser's bottom line: to sell. People won't buy products unless they can fit them into their ideal image of what their lives are or, more importantly in advertising, what they should be like.

LeoShe creative director Jeanie Caggiano, also a vice president, points out that the current generation of mothers grew up watching TV. "They are smarter, sharper and far more cynical," she says. "This is a generation with a bullshit meter that will go off at the slightest provocation." Survival for marketers to moms, says Caggiano, means deep knowledge of their targets and a more subtle approach.

Fedewa spoke with Salon Mothers Who Think about the way advertisers package and sell to moms today. A leader of the LeoShe division, she's been in the advertising business for 15 years. Fedewa has worked on campaigns for McDonald's, Proctor & Gamble, Pillsbury, Ameritech, Kellogg and Hallmark. She is the mother of a 4-year-old and two adult stepchildren.

Caggiano added to the discussion, elaborating and clarifying in a later interview. She also is a veteran of the advertising business and the mother of a 7-month-old daughter.

Tell me about LeoShe -- how it came to be and what your team is doing.

Denise Fedewa: When you work in the advertising business, a lot of what you do in terms of research and learning about women is to look through the lens of the product you're working on. If you're working on deodorants or anti-perspirants, everything you do starts with, "Let's go talk to the frequent anti-perspirant purchasers!" or "Let's go talk to the heavy processed-cheese users."

So your research gets to be skewed toward the kind of people who are heavy users of the product. What several of us realized is there are really much broader things going on in women's lives that we as marketers need to understand and we're not picking up on them because we have this product lens on all the time.

We started LeoShe two years ago as a group that was just going to be an added bonus to Leo Burnett clients and help all of our efforts here at Leo Burnett. But what happened is -- because we do go to the grassroots and find out new things that no one else has written about -- it's taken off. Now we've become our own business.

What would you say have been the traditional messages sent to moms?

Fedewa: All of us in LeoShe have worked on several brands targeted to moms over the years. We've all experienced having to tell the creative team that this assignment is a "moms assignment" and they're not thrilled. The reason is, in the past it's automatically meant the genre of very stereotypical, generalized ads with a universal but boring portrayal of what moms are.

I think that what's happened with advertising is that we've fallen into these cliches, these stereotyped portrayals of people because [companies] have boxed themselves in. "Here's the way we can portray a working mom that everyone culturally accepts." Even though it might be really removed from what's going on right now.

We made it our mission to turn all that thinking upside down, to challenge the conventions about moms. What we saw was about seven or eight clichéd categories that you could put all the moms advertising into.

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