Marketing to Women: Soccer Moms, Yoga Moms, Twinkie Moms

Marketing to Women: Soccer Moms, Yoga Moms, Twinkie Moms

My son and I were piling into the Volkswagen Rabbit test car in   front of the 7-Eleven, loaded up with our favorite after-school snacks – frozen Cokes, Twinkies and Cheetos – when my teen noticed the woman passing in front of our car with two small children in tow.

“That’s a yoga mom,” he said matter-of-factly. I’d never heard the term before, but it rolled off his tongue as if it were an everyday label. And I knew what he meant.

Her slender, tanned figure was outfitted in skin-tight black Spandex pants, cropped below the knees and showing off her muscular calves. A short white tank top revealed her flat Abs.

A yoga drop-out, I suddenly felt self-conscious of my middle-aged jellyroll, felt guilty about the Twinkie I was shoving into my mouth and was embarrassed by my pathetic, aged attire -- baggy, elastic-waist khakis I had worn in the early days of pregnancy for my 15-year old and in the days just after giving birth to him.

It wasn’t the clothes or the well-toned physique alone that signaled this woman was a yoga mom. It was her vehicle.

“Look at what she’s driving,” my son said in that tone when he thinks I'm disgustingly clueless. “A Yukon Denali .”

Saving SUVs

I immediately recalled my conversation late last month with Ford’s sales analyst, George Pipas. He was forecasting a nosedive by decade's end in sales of large sport-utility vehicles like the GMC Yukon Denali the woman was driving as well as the Chevrolet Tahoe and Ford’s Expedition and Lincoln Navigator.

Maybe not, I thought as my mental light bulb went off. Maybe automakers could prevent such a sales fall-off if they just market to the appropriate target – this yoga mom category I’d just become aware of.

Yoga moms: Yesterday's news

Turns out, this isn’t a new demographic at all. Yoga moms replaced soccer moms, who are anciet history. And yoga moms are now being supplanted by a newly named phenomenon -- Alpha and Beta Moms.

According to an article in trade journal Advertising Age a couple months ago, Alpha Moms are those high-powered, intensely-driven executive women, who do it all and do everything perfectly -- or so it appears. Beta Moms -- well, think of them as slacker moms.

I'm not sure what they drive -- that's for later research -- but no doubt the Alpha Mom's vehicle is meticulous; the Beta Mom's car surely is trashed, with Cheerios squished into the upholstory.

Still, it was this Yoga Mom that intrigued me.

The Yoga Mom Defined

A Google search of “yoga moms” turned up an article published by Business Week in November 2005 entitled “In Hot Pursuit of Yoga Mama.” The subtitle read:  “She's busy and choosy. But reach her, and you tap into her network of friends, too.”

A subsequent story in Media Life the month after started the way I was thinking about opening this column – something to the effect of “move over soccer mom; here comes the yoga mom.”

There’s even been a study done on yoga moms. Marta Loeb, founder of the Boston-based, mom-focused research company, Silver Stork Research, published a study called “The U.S. Mom Market Report,” cited in the Business Week article.

And there’s a novel about them. Author Katherine Stewart’s first novel, The Yoga Mamas, follows a group of fashion-obsessed mothers through spas and baby boutiques.

I learned a lot about the yoga mom from my reading:

· She obviously does yoga -- likely before, during and after pregnancy, some apparently even during child birth -- something called Yoga Birth -- and after childbirth with her new baby.

· She is middle or upper class.

· She likely lives on the East or West coast.

· She’s a mother -- just like “our” soccer moms, the obviously young Media Life article author noted. But she's different.

· She’s a stay-at-home mom, with, possibly a part-time job. She’s very busy with yoga classes, book clubs and Internet surfing for baby goods and information on being a better mom.

· She’s active and fit, “happily exposing her belly bump between a short top and low-rise trousers.”

· She’s “more focused, more balanced” in her life than the soccer mom with a “firm sense of self.”

My college-age daughter, who inherited her sarcasm from her mother and works summers as a waitress often serving yoga moms, refers to them as  “soccer moms in touch with themselves.” I can hear a collective “Ohm” now.

"Spend, spend, spend"

I kept reading and discovered some incongruities in yoga moms.

While one article noted, “she doesn’t want it all; she wants only what she thinks matters,” it seems what matters comes with a hefty price tag. She loves – adores – her baby. And she expresses her adoration with dollars. “It's about having the best for her and her baby, but also having what's unique, what speaks to her sense of style,” said one article.

Yoga moms “spend, spend, spend” on such things as $200 Petunia Pickle Bottom diaper bags and $700-plus Bugaboo strollers. They massage their babies with Burt’s Bees Buttermilk lotion, not Johnson & Johnson baby oil. No Gerber for these precious ones; only organic brands from Whole Foods will do. They buy products they see celebrities using.

Yoga moms are  “transforming the whole look of the little kids’ category,” one expert said, who estimates it is a growing to a $27-billion business.

Bottom line: For marketers and carmakers, the Gen Y, consumer-focused yoga mom in her prime child bearing years is a gold mine.

Spreading the word

Plus yoga moms are influential. If they like a product, they spread the word. Howard Dean’s campaign manager in the 2004 Presidential race said yoga moms are more desirable for politicians to target than Soccer Moms or NASCAR dads because they are so heavily networked. He called them “the center of the megaphone.”

WDYMD?

The question these articles didn’t answer was WDYMD -- What Do Yoga Moms Drive? Except for saying yoga moms spend a lot of time in their cars, the articles, studies and books said nothing about what they drive.

So I launched my own research.

My college-age daughter and I cruised the parking lots of the dozens of yoga centers in our toney Detroit suburb, which remains heavy in domestic makes but has more imports than other suburbs.

Sure enough, those lots were lined with SUVs -- big ones like the Yukon Denali my son saw our 7-Eleven yoga mom driving.

Bearing in mind that here in the Midwest we’re behind in trends and fashions by at least a couple of years, and we’re biased toward by our own locally made vehicles, I expanded my inquiry.

The Quintessential Yoga Mom Mobile

I consulted an expert. One from the West Coast. The mother of all yoga moms.

Lissa Coffey, of Westlake Village, Calif., is the self-proclaimed pre-eminent yoga mom. She claims to have started the yoga mom trend and boasts she is the only yoga mom in the nation to be honored by the mayor of a major city (Los Angeles) for her promotion of yoga. She wrote a book, "What's Your Dosha, Baby?" (Dosha is India’s 5,000-year-old practice of living in harmony with nature, I learned.) She’s got a Web site of the same name as her book. She’s produced yoga DVDs, and she’s appeared on numerous talk shows and news programs.

Networked, indeed. I’d barely hit the send button on my e-mail asking her what she drove and what other yoga moms drive when Coffey shot back a response.

“I drive a (Toyota) Prius! That is the quintessential car for Yoga Moms,” she wrote. “We have to walk the talk. We're definitely into healthy in all aspects of life, including a healthy environment for our kids. We put on the miles carting them around, and the Prius is roomy enough for the kids and all their gear.”

Pop the trunk of the Prius, and you’re likely to spot canvas grocery bags next to the yoga mat. “It is SO uncool right now to go the paper or plastic route!” she wrote.

Coffey said yoga moms with more than two children are a rare breed as “we are also concerned with the population growth problem, so if we have more than two we adopt.” But if they have more than two children, yoga moms lean toward the Ford Escape Hybrid. Rich yoga moms with more than two kids opt for the the Lexus RX400 Hybrid.

“You will never catch a yoga mom in an SUV that is NOT a hybrid!”

Oops. Guess my idea to save traditional large SUVs (and I'm no fan nor a driver of them, by the way) from demise by marketing to yoga moms is a lousy one.

But there’s still hope – if they are hybrids. General Motors will introduce hybrid-powered GMC Yukon and a Chevrolet Tahoe this fall; Chrysler will follow with a hybrid Dodge Durango and Chrysler Aspen. BMW has one on the way as well.

Maybe hybrid powertrains will save large SUVs -- it automakers market them to Yoga moms.

Namaste!

Image credit: from Business Week's "In Hot Pursuit of Yoga Moms"

Michelle Krebs:  is Editor-in-Chief of AutoObserver.com. Follow @AutoObserver on Twitter.