They’re Playing Our Song
Today’s New York Times Arts section features a piece of the changing face of marketing youth targeted music. Market for Hipsters-in-Training is the NYT offering more on the “new breed of parent” as the media keeps calling them, and in specific, “costal parents” which is quite an accurate and important classification.
Tammy La Gorce takes us on a well currated tour of the mini-me music scene. There is a lot of music out there that is making its way into these particular consumer’s hands (parental hands that is). And it is well understood and accepted that the marketing machines behind these releases are making the difference between something simply fun and a movement with strong sales to support the claim.
And, of course, this marketing is aimed at the parent – 100% and without excuse. The Forty Weeks notion of the parent being the key influencer and decision maker in the juvenile market – and speaking the right language to them – in this case – singing the right tune- continues to be right on the money. In specific, these releases answer a needed call - they keep the parent forever young, hip and with an uber-cool progeny to prove it.
To be a parent in 2006 — especially a coastal, well-heeled, contemporary-minded one — is to be blasted by possibilities for nurturing impeccable musical taste in one’s offspring. The commercial successes, like Disney’s “Baby Einstein” series of albums, have been widely noted on the Billboard charts and in Wal-Mart shopping carts. But they overshadow a hipper niche of kid music that is encouraging a curious form of parental connoisseurship, where “High Fidelity” meets high chairs.
That this ballooning genre is meant as much for the parents as the children, and probably more, is readily acknowledged by some of those producing and buying it.
Forgive me for banging our own drum (and for this lousy abuse of literary license!!!), and this is how we have always guided our clients. Keep a keen focus on the real decision makers and respond to their needs, wants and desires as adults first. Know the parent, find the parental sweet-spot and deliver an experience driven product that rings (sings?!?!) true.