Meeting Modern Moms

If women buy most things, moms buy most of what women buy. The search to find, understand, serve and sell moms is a huge business which has spawned a virtual online cottage industry.

Now one of the pioneers of the mom world, Lolita Carrico, a single mom and founder of ModernMom.com, is positioning her site as an early warning radar for trends and product ideas and as a flexible vehicle to reach, survey, measure, understand, interact with and persuade moms. Her 100,000 registered users can be accessed online and offline to test, review or approve products, collect front line consumer intelligence, measure attitudes and outlooks or directly connect with target customers in live events or local clubs.

With 10,000 active super-users, marketers can dice and slice the database to build research or sampling panels of 500 highly targeted moms. Moms can be targeted by a broad range of psycho-demographic selects that include age of moms or age of children, family size, income, education, geography and even step-moms. The proprietary database is regulated by a contact strategy which limits the number of contacts per mom per year to avoid burn out and to circumvent built-in sampling error.

Driven by requests from clients like Procter & Gamble, General Mills or AOL led Lolita to offer marketers practical insights into product satisfaction and to offer site visitors "Mom Tested" product reviews that get 5 times the page views of editor-written reviews. Marketers can create and select panels of moms, place full size samples in the hands of target customers and get direct feedback and/or generate online buzz.

Using this service P&G has given products to target customers to test, distributed coupons, sparked online reviews at ModernMom.com and elsewhere and proactively identified practical product problems and even a few clunkers. For Mattel, the site organized "Playdate" events in 10 markets where mothers and daughters road tested a new Barbie and Barbie DVD in backyard parties. For Mr.Clean Magic Eraser, the site was an early proponent and recommender of the product which has become a standard tool among American moms.   

This access and research service is growing faster than advertising on the site and is contributing almost 50 percent of the site's gross revenue. The body of reviews will be collected under a "Mom Tested" tab on the homepage in September and over time could become the digital equivalent of the Good Housekeeping seal. In the near term, Lolita is planning a series of Modern Mom"Connect" reports to document attitudes and preferences among moms to monitor trends and "word of mom" and to offer moms and those looking to reach her insights and tips on coping with the world's toughest job.

All this mom stuff indicates a bigger array of marketing opportunities presented by sites with registered user databases and activist leadership. ModernMom represents a nexus between online content and communities and real world behavior that offer fast, efficient ways to research, understand and engage customer segments.

         

Comments

[Lulu]

So let me get this straight. You create a website and have women trust you and register and than you turn around and sell their collectiv knowledge to big business so they can test their products and you make money. Wow, I love the business idea. Ms. Carrico, you are my idol.

[Magic Eraser]

I love the idea behind this. It is great that you can make a profit as well as give out useful information.