I often find myself in conversations with other marketers describing a group of moms through a particular label. I’m sure you’ve heard the same. Former President Bill Clinton put the term “soccer moms” on the map in his election campaign. To my surprise, Wikipedia has a thorough description of soccer moms and accurately has little to do with soccer. “Alpha mom” is repeatedly used by today’s marketers in their hopes of reaching influential mothers that will spread ideas to other moms. Wikipedia’s ‘alpha mom’ definition is much less compelling than soccer moms.
Several years back, lucid put together an internal team to build a “moms segmentation model” to create our own labels and definitions, but every attempt met failure. It wasn’t that we didn’t know how to do it, it was that whenever a category label was defined, it was incomplete, open to misinterpretation, and limiting. It was a pleasure to kill that project. Since then, our approach has been to pay attention and market to moms’ behaviors, and minimize the influence of a segmentation label.
