How receptive are moms to media throughout the day?

By tailoring messages and media buys to new research insights about moms, marketers might grow more effective.

Brands and stores want to get inside the minds of moms to influence their buying decisions when they procure for their households. Advertising has always been on the front line of this effort, with much of the expenditures wasted.

So many shifts in consumer lifestyles, purchase criteria, household dynamics and even media fragmentation make it increasingly difficult for CPG and retailers to stay aligned and relevant to moms. Yet marketers believe that by understanding media usage, they also learn more about moms' day-to-day challenges.

New research from the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) and the Media Behavior Institute (MBI), conducted between September 2010 and February 2011, “provides a window into where moms are every minute of the day and, more importantly, offers deeper behavioral insights such as their mood, who they are with and what they are doing,” said Jane Clarke, managing director, CIMM, which counts PepsiCo, Unilever, ConAgra Foods and Procter & Gamble among its members. Some 1,000 U.S. adults age 18-64 used an eDiary iPhone app to record their media behavior at 30-minute intervals over 10 days.

Among key findings:
•    Young moms age 18-32 spend 29% less time doing household chores, meal prep and grocery shopping than older moms.
•    25% fewer millennial moms prepare meals than older moms.
•    Moms 18-32 are 24% less likely to be reached with television at meal prep time; they prefer mobile and print at that time of day.  These Gen Xers multi-task with the web, e-mail, mobile and TV as part of the landscape.
•    Moms 18-32 spend 43% more of their day connecting to others than do people in the 47-64 age range.
•    Both Boomer moms and Gen X moms spend almost one-third of their day on “basic duty” chores.
•    Fewer than 15% of moms feel happy during meal prep occasions; this appears to be one of the least happy times of day.

Marketers can adjust their media buying and messaging to the rhythms of American moms, aiming to improve advertising ROI. The Lempert Report believes these insights could also be used by CPG to help develop products and by retailers to offer services that provide appropriate lifts at the right times of day.