Millennials—those born from the early 1980s to the early 2000s—are today between 20 and 36 years old, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that this generation makes up 90% of all new parents. The new millennial guard is taking over the parenting role, and they’re redefining what it means to be a parent in the process. As parents are the largest consumer segment, it’s important for everyone to understand how to market to this new demographic of parents, but it’s especially important for companies building products for parents. And I mean really understand it, beyond just the stereotypes that abound about millennials.

At Winnie, we’re obsessed with understanding what motivates parents and how we can make their lives better. To that end, we recently conducted State of Parenting 2017 survey and the results showed that this major life change represents a shift in what’s true about millennials. They’re no longer the self-centered “generation me” you hear so much about. They are perhaps the world’s most competent parents yet, they love being parents, and they care more than ever about raising happy, healthy children. They value experiences over things, they are involved in their children’s lives but they’re also super busy and overloaded. Most importantly, they don’t fit neatly into traditional roles and buckets. They look, act, and think differently from parents of the past.

Given these insights, it’s clear that few parenting products market correctly to the millennial generation of parents they need to reach. If you’re building a product for parents, or that could benefit by being used by more parents, here’s what you need to keep in mind when marketing your product.

1. Never mommy brand your product

Just because you’re building a product for parents doesn’t mean it’s a product for moms. This might seem like a minor point but I assure you it matters! What’s particularly interesting about millennial fathers compared to generations before them is that they have a greater sense of being energized as the primary stay at home parent. 40% of the millennial dads we surveyed either were current stay home dads or had been in the past. 65% of them said they could see themselves being a stay home dad. Alienating dads will not only halve your potential market size, it will make you less appealing to moms who are happy to see men take on a bigger parenting role. Not to mention that some families don’t even have moms in them.

In general, it’s critical to keep in mind that traditional mindsets about parenting are evaporating—marriage is optional, home ownership is lower priority—so you need to be extremely careful not to market your product with dated notions of what makes a family or a parent. Use inclusive language when marketing your product and photos that showcase the diversity of how families are composed today.

2. Don’t assume there’s a stay at home parent

19% of Winnie parents surveyed were stay at home parents. Let that sink in. Less than a quarter of users who are highly engaged with a parenting app are full-time parents. The majority of households have all parents working at least part-time, because either both parents bring in income or they are single parent households. That means that in most households, there is no longer someone whose sole job it is to parent. Parents have less time for parenting so the products built for parents need to either save them time or make that time more valuable.

3. Things don’t matter much, but experiences do

Helping parents having great experiences, especially great family experiences, is super important. Parents care a lot more about the time they spend with their families than material things they could buy for themselves or their kids. This doesn’t mean physical products are dead; it means you have to be smart about how to sell them to parents. If you’re a company that sells physical items to millennial parents, think about ways to frame those products in terms of experiences that families can have together.

4. Being a good parent is extremely important

If you can frame your product in terms of how it will help parents become better parents, you will win hearts and minds. Our survey results tell us that looking good, being fit, even having a career are all less important to millennials than being a good parent. So if you think appealing to millennial parents’ self-centered desires is the fastest way into their wallets, you’re wrong. Millennial parents specifically cite time and time again how being a parent shifted their priorities and made them more likely to put their kids above themselves, and this is certainly true when it comes to purchasing decisions.

5. It’s complicated

Parenting in 2017 is complicated. New parents are living further away from their own parents and support structures and they move more frequently than previous generations. The political environment is unstable, not to mention the natural environment thanks to climate change. These are unprecedented times and there is a lot of uncertainty and financial instability. So beyond just how you market your product, it’s important to be part of the solution. If you are building a solution that addresses the lack of a village, helps parents defray the increasing costs of raising children, or helps with reducing the general stress that parents today are under, your product has a much higher chance of having product-market fit, a prerequisite for successfully marketing any product.

Want more insight? Read about why millennials may be history’s most competent parents.

Winnie is the companion app for modern parents. Whether you want to find new things to do with your kids, ask for advice, or just get to the nearest changing table in a hurry, we can help.

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