What marketing genius came up with this book cover?
The Mom Factor is a book all about how Moms make their purchasing decisions.
I haven't read it, so I can't comment on the quality of the writing. My question is, what marketing genius decided to try to promote this topic by featuring a nearly-headless woman on the cover??? She's barely in the picture!
Are they trying to tell us that marketers see a mother as an anonymous body with a pair of breasts and a baby on her hip?
posted by MojoMom at 8:00 PM
5 Comments:
Maybe they are trying to tell us we have no capability to think given one needs a head in order to house a brain. Right?
But on the flip side, I know we had no control over our book's cover as the publisher made that decision and didn't ask us for our opinion nor get our input beforehand.
Will check out the book though, as we do know that moms do feel mommy guilt in relationship to what is marketed to their children and what they purchase for their kids.
I know that authors often have no input regarding the book cover design or marketing, which is unfortunate and, I've always felt that system is a disservice to writers.
It's common to show a Mom and child with the Mom cropped out of the picture. On The Mom Factor it really stood out in a bothersome way for me--the fact that it was a marketing book made it seem particularly ironic.
Another new book on this topic you may want to consider reading is Trillion Dollar Moms: Marketing to a New Generation of Mothers by Maria Bailey and Bonnie Ulman.
You're exactly right. It's "mom" as type, "mom" as segment, not as person,
and I'm sure that's what you'll find inside.
Wow, Amy, thanks for calling out this cover. Whoever made the decision to use this picture must believe that "what really drives where [women] shop" is the child. But there is a bit more to us than that, eh?
There are two things at work here that are troubling to me: First, the headless woman. I have seen Jean Kilbourne's Killing Me Softly too many times not to bristle at this marketing/advertising phenomenon. A woman without a head seems to be a real selling point, at least in the advertiser's minds.
Second, baby as accessory. I have a really hard time with how deeply consumerism impacts mothers.
These are biggies. Much bigger than a book cover, but I think it is really important to be aware of what we look at and what ideas are being sold to us on the cover of each book or in the pages of each magazine.
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