The market for baby products is lucrative: warehouses for exclusively baby products are becoming more common nowadays and checklists for expectant parents are becoming increasingly longer. But why is this the case? According to Professor of Sales and Account Management Willem Verbeke, this is due to a favorable combination of psychological factors and marketing strategy. Every parent namely wants the best for his child, and marketeers make grateful use of this fact.
Expectant parents feel a great need to build a nest and to prevent that their child will have to face any problems, says Professor Verbeke. It is their fear, which is one of the most important incentives for human decision making, which marketeers address in their advertisements for all kinds of baby products. They praise these baby products by emphasising how they can reduce the fear of not taking good care of your child. It is a nudge, says Professor Verbeke, a so-called ´fear nudge´, which these marketeers use to trigger parents to buy all kinds of expensive baby products.
Parents do nowadays only buy the newest and chiquest items they can find, because the layette must be presentable. And so must be their child itself. As such, the baby industry is becoming manipulative, says Professor Verbeke. We know so much about the risks that a child faces and about their physical and psychological development, but also about materials and techniques, that this tendency of parents cannot be seen as a logical consequence of the knowledge-based economy any longer.
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Read the entire article (in Dutch) in De Volkskrant, d.d. 7 November 2018.