Brandweek: Meet the New Tribal Mom

What do mothers want? Today's Gen-Y mom wants connectedness, immediacy, and input, Becky Ebenkamp writes in Brandweek. The martyr-like soccer mom, chained to the wheel of her minivan, has been replaced by a multimedia multitasker who plays WiiFit with her kids, then logs onto Facebook to brag (or bitch) about the experience.

New moms are rejecting the Soccer Mom persona because, well, their moms WERE the Soccer Moms. So it's their job, just like boomer moms had to reject the Betty Furness paradigm. We can't do what our moms did.

In 2008, brands that engage women with kids, and allow them to customize the product and make it their own, will succeed, the story says. "She wants to have it her way, even though, in today's world, that could mean roughly a billion different things."

Some programs that work, according to Brandweek:

• Peer-to-peer support and information gathering. These moms tend to live away from family, so social networking in "mom tribes" is critical. The Parenting Group, publisher of Parenting and Babytalk magazines, runs MomConnection message forums where members share ideas and advertisers like Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark and Clorox can read them. And if you burn her, the tribal mom won't hesitate to tell the world.
• Integration is a better word than balance. Today's moms saw their moms attempt to achieve balance -- and fail. "These moms are hanging onto their personal identities ... they've customized their lives just like they've customized their TVs with TiVo and their music with iPods," says Maria Bailey, author of "Marketing To Moms." Suave and Sprint co-sponsor a site called "In the MotherHood," where moms submit their stories for consideration as comedy videos. "For us, this generation of moms is marked by the multitasking of everything they experience," said Dave Hollis of Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment.
• Market with, rather than to, these young mothers. They seek to be partners, not just shoppers, and they know when they're being played. "It's not a one-way dialogue," says Dave Balter, CEO of BzzAgent. a consumer network with 35,000 Gen-Y moms. BzzAgent worked with Nestle Waters to launch Aquapod, water bottles shaped like rocketships, by asking moms and kids for ideas to make water-drinking more fun.
• Involve kids too. Consultant Chris Moessner of Just Kid Inc. says Nintendo built the Wii platform by encouraging parents and kids to have fun together. "As Gen Xers, we just went down and played videogames by ourselves," he says. "But now moms get to play the Wii Fit and Wii Games with their kids. Moms are on YouTube e-mailing funny clips to their friends, and kids are e-mailing mom funny stuff too."