Marketing to Pregnant Women

Saturday I saw my youngest daughter who is 7 months along with her first child. Besides a change in her eating habits, there are other things going on which her husband can verify.

Here's a few tips from RBR.com:

Moms decide where the money gets spent

Your mission: help them decide. But if any of you have ever become a Mom, or helped a woman become a Mom, you don’t need Dr. A. K. Pradeep to tell you that the new Mom undergoes a great deal of mental change, and likely will never go back to pre-Mom ways. And that can greatly affect how a Mom should be approached as a marketing target.

A mother-to-be isn’t just providing an environment for a baby to reach the level of maturity necessary to enter into the world – she is also undergoing neurological changes of her own – “the most significant brain changes of their adult lives," says Pradeep.

The upshot is that this woman, who studies have show controls 85% of household purchasing, accounting for $2 Trillion in sales, is undergoing changes that may affect her receptiveness to certain types of marketing in either a positive or a negative way.

Pradeep’s book is called 'The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind,” and in it he devotes a full chapter to neurological changes in mothers and how it changes their perception of marketing messages.

“Women who go through pregnancy and give birth experience the most significant brain changes of their adult lives,” Pradeep said. “If your product, your package, your message, or your retail environment hits home with these highly-evolved brains, you have won over powerful allies who will support you through an enhanced network of online and offline communities beyond anything that your company could create. But if you aren't aware of what the Mommy Brain demands in each of these categories, and make a mistake, those very same networks of Mommy Brains may reject you out of hand.”

Here are some of the changes Pradeep suggests that marketers need to be aware of: The new Mom:
* gains enhanced sensory capabilities, especially the sense of smell; this has significant implications for marketers who might explore adding "scent marketing" elements to their packaging and retail displays
* adds supercharged new neural networks that impact every lobe of the brain
* puts a premium on authenticity in products and marketing messages
* doubles in size its 'brain maps' of the chest and upper arm areas
* functions with greatly enhanced emotional intelligence—especially the feeling of empathy
* operates an unmatched mirror neuron system that presents important opportunities -- and potential pitfalls — for marketers to pursue

According to Pradeep, his chapter “explains in detail how the female brain undergoes fundamental structural and behavioral changes that can significantly affect how mothers perceive and respond to commercial messages, package designs, retail environments, and many other components of modern marketing. He reveals that neuroscience has only begun exploring the maternal human brain in any depth within the past five years, but the findings provide startling insights into the profound alterations that occur during pregnancy and throughout the life of every mother.”

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