Editor's note: Janet Oak is managing partner at The Family Room LLC, a Norwalk, Conn., research company. This article appeared in the April 9, 2012, edition of Quirk's e-newsletter.

 

Once thought to be the boring backwater of consumer and social marketing, marketers are coming to realize that families are a dynamic marketplace segment, the epicenter of a growing number of global trends and the biggest consumer market in the world by a factor of three. Yet most researchers in the family and kid space continue to employ the same set of binary research methodologies to survey/interview them that was developed 20 years ago: conducting research with either moms or with kids or with moms and kids separately but never together. This segregated approach fails to recognize that families are a system, not a discrete subset of unrelated, individual cohorts, operating independently.   

 

A closer relationship

 

The modern family is an interconnected web that behaves as a single, anthropomorphic entity, though this has not always been the case. A study conducted by The Family Room LLC, Norwalk, Conn., called Parents As Peers found that today, parents and kids have a very different type of relationship than in past generations, with 62 of parents percent saying, "I have a closer relationship with my children than my parents had with me." In addition, 59 percent of moms agree that, "these days there is less of a generation gap between parents and kids" and 45 percent agree that, "I am less strict with my kids than my parents were with me." In fact, the nature of the parent/child relationship is undergoing dramatic changes. Perhaps the most disturbing finding is that nearly half of moms say they consider their child to be one of their best friends.

 

This move from parents as authority figure, disciplinarian and coach to buddy, mentor and cheerleader can be attributed to a generational shift from War Baby parenting to Baby Boomer parenting. War Babies practiced a free-spirited and - some would say - aloof parenting style, while Boomers, the parents of today's Millennials, have answered the laissez-faire way in which they were raised by becoming helicopter parents. This parenting style has essentially transformed mommy-guilt into overindulgence when it comes to the physical, mental and emotional needs of their children. Gen X parents, who breed Gen Z children, take this notion even further with their bubble-wrap mentality, where children are highly overprotected and sheltered but nonetheless consulted on a wide variety of household purchases.

 

Decline of the traditional 

 

This generational shift, according to The Family Room's Family Dynamics study, has resulted in the decline of the traditional gatekeeper, with less than one-fourth of moms describing themselves as the final decision maker. The factor analysis in this study also showed that collaborative decision-making has risen to the No. 1 form of family decision-making overall, from choosing what beverage makes it into the school lunchbox all the way to where the family goes on vacation. This collaboration can be seen in one of three highly-democratic decision-making typologies employed by families today, including Board of Directors, Family Meeting and Parent Screen.

 

So it's not surprising that, according to The Family Room's 2011 Family Factor study (n=2,000 parents and kids ages 9-17), the majority of moms and kids today share a lot of things in common, especially restaurants, music, clothing and TV shows. In addition to traditional categories like candy and toys where you would expect there to be a great deal of kid influence, parents are now asking children for their opinions on products in non-traditional categories, like automotive, electronics, travel, personal care, family dinners, etc., and are buying products their children recommend. In fact, parents take kids' opinions seriously regarding products for kids and family and also products that parents use/consume for themselves. Parents say the main reason they take their child's opinion seriously is to teach them that their opinion matters.

 

Highest common ground 

 

To address this new form of collaborative decision-making, The Family Room aims to find the highest common ground among disparate family members, thereby eliminating the need for individual targets and separate marketing and media plans. Finding the highest common ground is a system dynamics-based approach to child and family marketing that seeks to align the combined influence of the entire family behind the same brand for the same reason.

 

If you follow this line of thinking, then I'm sure you would agree that the old way of conducting research with moms and kids independently doesn't present the whole picture of how and why products and services do or do not make it into the household. It doesn't consider how the family members interact to make choices; whose needs matter most and whose carry the day; how conflicts are settled and disputes resolved; and how this differs by category and occasion.

 

To explore these issues, you need to turn the traditional approach to mom and kid research upside down and seek to uncover the inspiration and insights behind the shared needs of the whole family rather than the discrete needs of its individuals. Rather than studying what makes family members unique, researchers also must be students of what family members can agree upon.

 

Some suggested principles and techniques for operating within this new construct should include:  

 

  • Designing methods for facilitating organic observation of how products and services make it into families lives and how they are consumed or used once they are adopted.
  • Determining approaches that explore the individual and collective needs that each family member brings to a specific category or occasion and where there is overlap or agreement.
  • Development of exercises that subjugate the needs of a single individual within a family while prioritizing the shared needs of the entire family.
  • Capturing responses that reflect the collaborative nature of decision-making, even insofar as facilitating the re-creation of the true nature of the parent-child interaction in a facility or in front of a computer.

This line of thinking has inspired a reinvention of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. Here are a few:  

 

Shop-alongs. We go in-store with families to observe the organic process moms, dads and kids go through in selecting items based on several very specific shopping missions aligned with prioritized need-states. One basket is for mom to include all of the items she would like her child and family to have for a particular need-occasion. Another basket is for the items the child would like to have but parents may not allow and the third basket is for all the items that the whole family can agree upon. Without fail, the third basket contains all the $500+ million brands. Throughout, we ask probing questions as they shop to understand key purchase drivers and barriers.

 

In-person concept optimization. This type of research is intended to ensure that the concepts in development go beyond a reflection of mom needs and kid needs to embody shared family needs. We do this by bringing families in to meet with our design team and moderators, working together to choose, polish and refine the lead ideas into highest-common-ground solutions.


What-if tests. This is a way of obtaining a more accurate quantitative ranking of products via a quick dip into an online family panel. Results show concept scores from a parent perspective, a kid perspective and shared family perspective. The output is a quantitative ranking of the ideas tested with data reflecting parent preferences, kid preferences and the top concepts parents and kids can agree on.

 

More difficult and less relevant

 

It's become clear that when it comes to decision-making in today's American family unit, separating kid and parent preferences is becoming more difficult and less relevant. The days of parents arguing with their offspring in the grocery aisle over snack options may be drawing to a close as both parents and kids seek compromise and family harmony. With children being treated as friends, confidantes and valued opinion-holders, it is the products and services that everyone can agree on that will win out. Kid, parent and family research benefit from addressing the family unit as a whole by rethinking the approach and analyzing families around this new reality.