• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, January 12, 2012

As marketers of products for children and families are increasingly discovering, family purchasing dynamics have shifted significantly in recent years.

Today, only one in four mothers describe themselves as the “gatekeepers” for family purchases; instead, both small and big-ticket purchases are most likely to result from democratic collaboration and consensus among family members, according to George Carey, founder and CEO of Norwalk, Conn.-based marketing, branding and product innovation consultancy The Family Room (formerly Just Kid Inc.).

This means, says Carey, that marketers must understand shared, overall family priorities or “passion points” and let families’ own agendas guide their marketing decisions and product launches. Instead, however, many if not most continue to hew to the traditional practice of basing decisions on commissioned research that is category-specific and/or skewed to the views expressed by moms, dads or kids.

“This, combined with tightening government constraints and increasing pressure from consumer groups rallying against marketing that targets children, goes far in explaining why more than 90% of in-market product launches for kids and families over the last year have failed,” despite some $10 million spent in trying to reach parents and children, he contends.

That’s why Carey overhauled his 18-year-old firm’s business model (hence the name change) over the past year, changing from a focus on brand marketing and strategy focused on targeting kids, pre-teens and tweens to a focus on research and strategy based on identifying families’ shared needs and priorities.

So what do families really care about?

A new study of the American family’s “passion points” from The Family Room reveals, for starters, that although families do care about “healthy lifestyles” (defined as “eating healthy foods and staying physically active”), this ranks far down their list of top priorities. In fact, just 15% of U.S. families agree that healthy lifestyles are a top priority or passion point for them – putting this at #10 in the rankings of 14 key priorities identified.

Here are those passion-point rankings:

1. Schools and education (agreed to be a top priority by 45% of families)
2.  Independence and making good choices (39%)
3.  Time with family (36%)
4.  Financial pressure (34%)
5.  Preparing child for success (28%)
6.  Creativity and self-expression (25%)
7.  Laughing and having fun (24%)
8.  Religious beliefs (22%)
9.  Making decisions together (17%)
10. Healthy lifestyles (15%)
11. Respecting others (14%)
12. Values and morals (11%)
13. Simplify/live simply (10%)
14. Safety and protection (9%)

Clearly, some of these priorities overlap. In overview, they point to three main drivers, says Carey.

“Preparing kids for success,” while ranked #5, is a core priority that appears to encompass many other priorities, including education, independence/making good choices, creativity/self-expression, religious beliefs, healthy lifestyles, respect for others, values/morals, living simply and safety/protection, he points out.

Financial pressure and stress, along with “trying to eke out a little time to have fun and experience joy together as a family,” are the other two overriding themes, Carey says. “Today’s kids are highly aware of and sensitive to family financial pressures, including debt, as well as their own growing, direct pressures to perform,” he observes.

Some specific findings reflecting these overriding concerns:

• While parents are stressed about the rising cost of sending their kids to college and ensuring that their kids have the right education, kids are growing more competitive about grades than they are about sports, now seeing academic success as a proxy for their self-worth and ability to be loved.

• Families’ concerns about financial pressures, including debt (the average consumer owed more than $4,200 in credit-card debt by the end of 2010, according to Experian) are driving them to place growing emphasis on financial responsibility and realizing better value from all of their purchases.

• Prioritizing family togetherness is rising, and the “generation gap” between parents and kids is shrinking.  Nearly half of parents say that they are less strict with their children than their parents were with them, and nearly half of moms consider their child or children to be among their “best friends.”

Implications for Food/Beverage and Other Marketers

These priorities, and their rankings, should be critical directional influencers in marketing and development in all categories of kids/families products and services, maintains Carey.

For instance, while the growing emphasis on offering healthier foods and beverages for kids and families is entirely appropriate and needed, banging the nutritional and/or weight-management drum may be more effective when approached as part of or a complement to other messaging themes or strategies.

Carey points to General Mills’s “Box Tops for Education” program as a prime example of marketing that effectively keys into real family priorities. The program enabled U.S. families to earn more than $59 million in cash for their budget-challenged K-through-8^th grade schools (more than 70,000 schools participate) to use toward supplies and other needs during the 2010-11 school year alone, adding to the more than $320 cumulative money earned between the program’s 1996 launch through 2009-10 school year, according to the program’s site.  

“This program proved so successful for General Mills that many other major national brands are now participating,” points out Carey.  A partial list beyond General Mills’s own products/brands includes Pillsbury, Old El Paso, Green Giant (including Fresh), Ziploc, Hefty, Kimberly-Clark, Nestle Juicy Juice, Avery, Welch’s, Land O’ Lakes and Brita. 

Another insight: “Knowing that teaching kids to make good choices in order to live happy lives is a major family priority, food and beverage marketers can help them realize this goal by rewarding kids for making good choices – meaning, by combining good taste and good nutrition,” Carey says. “Families want healthy foods that also delight and therefore reward those good nutrition decisions.”

Looking at other categories, he notes that Wii represents a breakthrough in entertainment because it has allowed families for the first time to engage together in games enjoyed by all. “Before Wii, digital games and entertainment served mostly to isolate family members and drive them apart,” he says.

Apple has succeeded in large part because of Steve Jobs’s drive to create products that tap into shared passions, including fostering learning, independence and creativity and self-expression through the products’ user-friendly/intuitive emphases, Carey adds. “The ‘Think Different’ campaign was all about self-expression and independence, of course, and Apple’s computers and devices are major education-enhancers,” he notes.

For the “American Family Passion Points” study, The Family Room analyzed more than 25 qualitative studies within the past six months on trends, developments and passion points among families. The qualitative data was used to develop quantitative online surveys drawing responses from approximately 500 mothers and 500 children, including moms’ and kids’ separate rankings of priorities and their “consensus”/family rankings. The samples were representative of U.S. families, defined as households with at least one parent and one child.

The next wave of the study, now being fielded, will show which priorities/passion points are rising and declining in importance, and may include survey participation by fathers and analysis/breakouts of Hispanic families’ responses, according to Carey.