The hapless, bumbling father is a stock character in product marketing. He makes breakfast for dinner and is incapable of handling, or sometimes even noticing, a soggy diaper. He tries desperately to hide the crumb-strewn, dirt-streaked evidence of his poor parenting before the mother gets home.
This is an image that many fathers who attended the Dad 2.0 Summit — a meeting of so-called daddy bloggers and the marketers who want to reach them — have come to revile. They are proud to be involved in domestic life and do not want to serve as the comic foil to the supercompetent mother.
In the past, consumer-product marketers weren’t all that concerned with what fathers thought — women, after all, make the majority of purchasing decisions for households. But men are catching up: In 2012 men spent an average of $36.26 at the grocery store per trip, compared with $27.49 in 2004, according to data from Nielsen. Companies see an opportunity to reach a new demographic.
The dad bloggers, for their part, are using their influence to change the way marketers portray them. To put it another way, while the mom space is crowded with players, the dad space has room for more. So there is big money to be made, both by companies looking at fathers as consumers and by daddy bloggers looking to ride a wave of brand sponsorship just as mommy bloggers have.
Privacy Policy We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you.
For example, Google, as a third party vendor, uses a DART cookie to serve ads on this site based upon your visit to our sites and other sites on the Internet. You may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting Google ad and content network privacy policy at: www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.
If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, please contact the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) at (207) 467-3500 or www.networkadvertising.org.
Comments