Posts Tagged ‘shopping’

I’m always trying to cut through advertising, to work out if something is really going to be useful to me. I wanted to present an insight into how I do that based on a recent book release. I know a lot of parents think that the answer to their problems is in something that they need to pay for , I don’t believe that’s true (unless it’s medical in nature) but the advertisers want us to believe it.

Whale Done Parenting: How to Make Parenting a Positive Experience for You and Your Kids, (well done parenting – get it?) was released this month and you can pick it up for roughly 11USD on Amazon.

It was written by the team behind Whale Done! : The Power of Positive Relationships, a management book which hit the bestseller lists something like seven years ago and still ranks highly on Amazon. I read it (I’m a manager) – the theme is positive reinforcement but with a whale analogy. Whale Done reused themes from “The One Minute Manager” also written by part of the Whale Done writing team, however the reuse meant it felt a bit recycled. In short this is a book written by a team who have recycled their own content in the past. I should add that I did like The One Minute Manager.

I’ve always been aware of the fact that many self help books have something in common: they can be designed to generate lots of money for very little author effort. That’s particularly true for management books and parenting books. There are nearly 120,000 parenting books on Amazon and almost a million on management. The sheer volume tells you how easy it is to pump out the content and you can expect that a certain amount of recycling is needed to keep those topics alive.

As well as the probable recycling of content this looks to also be recycling the concept. The Whale in the title is supposed to indicate the fact that if positive reinforcement (amongst other related techniques) can get killer whales kissing their trainers they can be used to get (insert anyone here) doing what you want. In Whale Done it was staff, in Whale Done Parenting it’s kids.

So if we add that up, we have a book which appears to be recycling both content and concept, describing the fact that positive reinforcement, with an analogy to animal training, works well as a training tool for children.

Strike one for me is that I personally find the idea that animal training is analogous to parenting pretty offensive. That might not be the idea behind the book but it’s the idea behind the title and that puts me off.

Strike two is that this feels designed to sell, as opposed to designed to help. Catchy title, low price point, lots of mention about how the authors are previous best sellers. They’re using authority, legitimacy, value and reputation to influence my buying habits. I don’t blame them but I can see right through it. Although that would be the publishers not the authors.

Strike three is that even though it’s cheap it feels like a cheaper book to write. I have to question the value of it. Take away the analogy and how many original ideas are presented in the book? Am I getting much for my 11USD? I’m not convinced.

And they’re out. For me at least.

That’s basically how I try to cut through the endless parenting noise on the book shelves: do I like the concept? is there spin involved or is it of genuine value? how much effort went into creating it?

To be fair to the authors, and I do want to be fair because this is a review of the marketing and the concept, not the writing, parents who lack an understanding of the value of positive reinforcement would probably find this to be as good a book as any. For managers who need the same check out the other two books I mentioned. But for me it’s a no thanks.

Obviously I decided not to buy Whale Done Parenting, but if I ever get given it I promise to write a review as a balance to this article, it would be interesting to see if I’m right.

Browse the web about fatherhood and you might come to the conclusion that if parenting were a profession men wouldn’t be promoted beyond middle management. The glass ceiling would kick in at the moment of birth. If it were a country it would be a dictatorship where men wouldn’t get a vote. It’s an absolute fact that the industry is heavily dominated by mothers.

Laurie Tarkan has recently written a great article over at the New York Times about the mother father dynamic: it’s a team sport, both players share an equal if different role, and it’s the teamwork rather than the individual success that gets the best outcome. This topic is growing in popularity as scientists and psychologists put forward similar points of view. Fathering skills are being recognised as equally important to a child as mothering, but despite this fathers are still very much outside the conversation.

Here’s my insight: Jeremy is 34, his wife Ally is 36. They have an 18 month old daughter.

“I get so frustrated when he offers to look after her so I can go out but then calls me constantly to ask what to do” Ally declares. “I call her constantly because when I’m with her everything I do is wrong.” he counters. I know it’s true because I’ve seen it happen between them. Ally has set herself up as the expert, easy to do because Jeremy is the primary income earner and is around their daughter less. That’s a very traditional pattern established in many families, motherhood out paces fatherhood when measured purely in terms of time served. The mother is for the most part dominant.

Which makes the reason fathers are not a part of the picture pretty simple to work out, it’s all about purchasing decisions. The advertisers and marketers have worked out that women tend to make those decisions and so they have feminisied the parenting activity.

Look at some examples: female clothing stores have child sections, mens clothing stores do not. Baby stores are all soft pastels and soft furnishings. In supermarkets baby products are on the same isle as female oriented products. Online baby stores, forums and blogs are dominated by women and those damn pastel shades. I hate pastel shades. It all serves to make me feel unwelcome as a father. It makes me want to step back and let my wife buy what she wants. So is this self fulfilling marketing? If the marketing was being targeted at men baby shops would look like hardware stores and I’d be there every weekend.

What fathers need to do is ignore the marketing, to separate the practical reality from what the marketers want us to think it is. They would prefer our partners to make all the decisions because their sales budgets are being spent on targeting the spending habits of females. The advertising, product design, product placement and incentives are all geared at influencing a womans decision. On that basis a man is actually the better equipped to make the choices, we can make decisions free from the influence of marketing professionals.

I don’t like pastel shades. I prefer power tools to soft furnishings. I couldn’t care less what buggy the celebrities are wheeling their kids around in these days. I’m a father and I can shop.