Why She Buys (15 page)

From Gymboree to Leapfrog, businesses promoting products that give children an educational advantage find a receptive audience with these women. And because moms spend a lot of energy organizing their kids’ activities, software and electronic gadgets that are sold with messages about staying connected to their kids find an interested audience with modern moms.

• Savvy kids impact their parents’ purchasing decisions more than ever
.

Kids’ opinions are weighed heavily in family purchasing decisions, especially those involving technology. When the Internet connection isn’t working, everyone knows to ask the twelve-year-old to fix it. Unsurprisingly, single mothers tend to involve their children in product decisions and technology issues more than women with husbands.

Because kids are on the receiving end of so many commercial messages, they become brand conscious at an early age and, more than ever, influence the brands their parents buy for them. My six-year-old nephew asked for a Darth Vader watch for his birthday, even though he has never seen the original
Star Wars
movie, and wouldn’t recognize Harrison Ford or Carrie Fisher if they served him pancakes for breakfast. The
Star Wars
marketing machine rages on after more than thirty years, capturing yet another generation through the branding of toys, dolls, video games, prequels, and sequels. It has successfully capitalized on the nostalgia of parents and grandparents, who are the people shelling out the money for these products.

• Many kids are being raised with luxuries that were once reserved for adults
.

From two-year-olds traveling with their parents in business-class airline seats (using their working parents’ miles) to kids’ birthday parties at hotel spas, the standards for kid luxury are climbing higher every year. Gone are pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey games and homemade chocolate cake for birthday parties. Parents sometimes feel pressured to do things such as rent an inflatable moonwalk for the entire neighborhood or take the whole crew to an amusement park. The cost of raising kids is
not
getting cheaper—it’s going in the other direction.

Smaller families often travel in nicer family cars. People who grew up riding in wood-paneled Ford Country Squire station wagons—sitting facing backwards in the “way back”—are now driving their kids around in $50,000 Audis, complete with individual DVD players and headphones.

Service businesses that cater to well-heeled children are finding a willing audience in their parents. Specialty hair salons, nail salons, pottery classes, spas, and other kid versions of adult luxuries are growing. Sometimes I find it jarring when I sit down for a pedicure and discover that the client next to me is an eleven-year-old girl. (It wasn’t until college that I got my first pedicure.) With
fewer kids, parents are often willing to spend adult-sized sums of money on them. And since they’ve had them later in life, they’re bringing the kids into their own adult world far more than previous generations did.

GLOBAL TREND #4

The Divorce Economy

Many of the people reading this book already know about the divorce economy because they’ve experienced it firsthand.

Though marriage is viewed as a private decision between a man and a woman, divorce has a far-reaching public impact. From the expense of lawyers and the bureaucratic costs of judges, courts, and programs such as child support enforcement and Medicaid, to the increasing number of children flying alone on airplanes for visits to noncustodial parents, the impact on the consumer economy begins with the simple fact that every divorce results in at least one geographic move, and in many cases two. Each divorce causes a torrent of consumer spending, and not just on divorce lawyers. As the character Ricky Bobby’s sons, Walker and Texas Ranger, squeal in the movie
Talladega Nights, “Divorce? Yeah, two Christmases!”

Divorce rates are skyrocketing in Japan, soaring in China, and high in Korea, and they’ve doubled in Italy over the last ten years.
²⁴
They are even on the rise in India, where marriage is the most sacred of cultural institutions. In the United States, the number remains at just under half of all marriages, with divorce being slightly less common among people with college educations.

Women historically have been plunged into a lower standard of living after divorce, as a result of losing their husbands’ income and benefits. While this is still true, the picture is improving, driven in part by the fact that so many married women now earn their own paychecks and are gainfully employed at the time of divorce. The result is that for some women, divorce is now a cause for
celebration—
complete with celebratory girlfriend parties. This is a new phenomenon that would have been inconceivable a few decades ago, when being divorced carried a heavy social and moral stigma.

The economic freedom to leave a bad marriage is just one reason that in Western countries, women are the filers in the majority of divorce cases.
²⁵
Another reason is that most mothers feel reasonably confident they’ll be awarded primary custody of their children, which isn’t necessarily true in many parts of the developing world.

In every part of the globe, divorce is becoming a more common fact of life. There are several contributing factors to this trend:

• More women around the world are gaining an education and earning money, so fewer people (of either sex) are trapped in bad relationships for purely economic reasons.

• In many developing countries, women have made strides in obtaining legal rights as individuals, not just as daughters and wives. They have also been exposed to Western conceptions about romantic love and the idea of self-fulfillment.

• Over the past twenty years, most countries have made it
easier for couples to get divorced. All the traditionally Catholic countries of Latin and South America, for instance, now allow divorce. In 2004, Chile became the last country in the Western Hemisphere to legalize divorce.

• In many cultures where keeping mistresses is commonplace, such as the modern Chinese cities of Beijing and Shanghai, women are fighting back and saying to their husbands, “You can’t have both me and a mistress; if you want to keep her, then
hasta la vista.
” Or as they say in Mandarin Chinese,
zai jian
.

Let’s take a peek at the life of a divorced woman who embodies several of the trends in this chapter. We’ll call her Katherine, and she is real, but her name has been changed. As you read about her, try to imagine how your product or service could fit into her life.

Katherine was twenty-five when she married Tom, her college boyfriend. Like so many couples, they were a perfect match until they weren’t anymore, for reasons neither could articulate well. The couple grew apart. Tom wound up having an affair with someone at work, and Katherine filed for divorce just after the couple’s eighth wedding anniversary. The judge allowed Katherine and Tom to share joint custody of their four-year-old son, and they now balance child care duties in an amicable way. They have chosen to live just a few miles apart from each other, to make shared parenting a bit easier.

Katherine has since remarried and had a daughter with her new husband. She works full time, and so does Tom. All the grandparents help with child care and transportation
issues, for which Tom and Katherine feel grateful and lucky. The grandparents live nearby and have the resources and inclination to help. Often, Katherine’s daughter joins Tom and their son to run errands or participate in birthday parties and other activities that involve mutual friends. Katherine even purchased a second child seat for Tom’s car, specifically for her daughter to use when she is with him.

Tom, therefore, often finds himself taking care of a little girl who is not biologically or legally his. For the most part, he’s happy to do it, and considers himself her uncle. The way he sees it, the girl is his son’s sibling and therefore an important part of his son’s life. It’s complicated, and there are three sets of grandparents in play at any given time, and the holidays are crazy, but somehow they make it work. There are many sacrifices—Katherine’s new husband, for instance, already had to turn down a job offer because of the need for his stepson to have close proximity to Tom. The boy has two bedrooms (one in each home), two sets of clothes, two bikes, two sets of toys, two Sony PlayStation consoles, at least two birthday parties every year, and one Christmas and one Hannukah.

As a working mother who balances a high-profile job, a custody schedule, a new spouse and an old spouse, and children who are in a half-sibling relationship with each other, Katherine is an embodiment of the modern divorced woman.

The New Singlehood

W
IDESPREAD
divorce has created a new, distinct period of singlehood in many women’s lives. This means that millions
of women now find themselves single in three distinct phases of life:

1
. In their twenties, before they get married

2
. In midlife, when nearly half get divorced

3
. At the end of life, since women live longer than men

The second stage of singlehood is unique. For one thing, women respond to divorce differently than men. Once the heartache is (theoretically) over, women are often on a mission to completely reinvent themselves, from their appearance to their job to their lifestyle, all with the goal of making a fresh start. After compromising their own tastes and desires in a relationship for so long, it can be a joyful exercise for these women to go out and discover what their own taste is in clothes, furniture, food, cars, and decor. They want to travel, they want to experience things, and they want to taste what they feel they’ve been missing.

After Divorce, Women Aren’t Just the Other Half; They’re the Only Half

D
IVORCE
can be a squeamish subject for businesspeople, but whether we like it or not, the notions of household and family have shifted—perhaps irrevocably. In the United States, the traditional nuclear family is now the minority type of household for the first time in modern history.
²⁶
The positive aspects of this reality should be reflected in the images, marketing messages, and sales language used by any organization.

It’s sobering to realize that fully one-third of all American babies are born to unmarried women and that more
than a quarter of all households (27 percent) are run by a single woman.
²⁷
Depictions of nuclear families exclusively may seem ideal to many people within a corporation, but they risk alienating divorced and single women—the very women with 100 percent purchasing power for their households. Since many senior-level male executives are married with children, it’s important to make sure their own life experiences don’t skew the decisions meant for an audience with a different reality.

What are the insights for business?

•
With each divorce comes the need for both people in the marriage to make themselves whole again
.

Messages that tap into women’s constant desire for reinvention are particularly powerful at this time of life. Events like divorce showers and “relaunch” parties are just starting to be promoted by hotels, department stores, and travel destinations. (Las Vegas is a natural for such things.) Our society is in the infant stages of developing cultural rituals for divorce. Perhaps there’s a role for business to play in the development of these rituals. Gatherings and “celebrations” are appealing because women want support and good wishes as they embark on their next phase of life. There are opportunities for all kinds of businesses, from gyms to salons, spas, and even those selling food products and apparel, to promote “reinvention” programs to help fuel the confidence and positive energy that newly divorced women are seeking.

•
With each geographic move comes the inevitable need for new furniture, new gadgets, and newly stocked pantries
.

Retailers should not only have wedding registries but also consider some form of divorce registries, so that women can help friends and relatives select gifts they really need. Not only do people have to replace what they’ve lost in the divorce, they usually want to add other new things as well, so that the realignment feels like a positive beginning.

From a broader standpoint, divorced parents of school-age children require duplicates of every kind of kid gear (making two-for-one promotions highly appealing), not to mention furnishings for the kids’ second bedroom in the other parent’s new household and all the toys, food, books, paint, art, mops, brooms, hammers, and cleaning gear needed to stock and decorate the new place.