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Why I Don’t Want A Monster In My Pants – Target Marketing
Dec 8 2007

Yes, I know it’s a great post title but sadly I did not come up with it.  Naomi at IttyBiz did and I’m borrowing it because in that post she did a mini ‘who is your customer’ marketing case study on Babble Soft called Identifying Your Target Market, Or Why I Don’t Want A Monster In My Pants. 

Since I have been overcome with software testing, deciding on a full-service SEO firm, addressing Holiday cards, doing the company books, staring into space, and looking for other people who will help me for free, for reduced fees, for a free lunch, with all of the other stuff I need help with, I did not notice until a few days later when I checked her blog that she mentioned Babble Soft.  Oh and yeah, she didn’t link to my blog so I didn’t realize she was writing about me.  🙂

Here is her off-the-cuff list of potential markets for Babble Soft:

Babble Soft has two groups of people to which they can market, parents and non-parents. To save space, we’ll just talk about parents here. In the parent category, we have:

– Mothers who are anal retentive.

– Fathers who dig all the latest technology.

– Parents who live in the US and are subject to the BULLSHIT PARENTAL LEAVE laws, forcing them to go back to work too early.

– Parents of multiples.

– Parents who work opposite shifts.

– Parents with older kids, especially those with high needs.

– Mothers with post-partum depression. (When you’re depressed, you need someone to think for you.)

That’s off the top of my head. If Babble Soft were to specifically target any one of these groups and market to them appropriately, she’d have more customers than she’d know what to do with. That’s not even getting into potential baby shower gifts, gifts from distant grandparents, gifts from nagging grandparents, gifts from over involved grandparents, etc.

Nothing surprising there and they all make sense to me.  I made the comment on her blog that even if you aren’t depressed but you are sleep deprived (probably the same thing) and you can’t stand your spouse, you need someone to think for you. 😉

The challenge as an entrepreneur is how to do that with extremely limited resources and no budget.  Anybody invented effective cloning technology yet? 

I haven’t done any formal Internet marketing to date, but I’m biting a big financial bullet next week and that will soon be changing.  We’ve done some PR (press releases, traditional media stories) but no one at the big publications like Parenting, Pregnancy Magazine, Parents, etc. will give us the time of day because [fill in the blank.].  I can’t afford to pay $15K+ to advertise on sites like that or on the granddaddymammy of baby sites babycenter.

Since this dilemma is just one of the reasons why entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart or the sane, I guess I’ll go see about answering Shane and Peter’s Interviewing You: The Entrepreneur post this pleasant, unusually warm December Saturday afternoon while my daughter and husband nap and my son works on a Transformer puzzle on the floor next to me…

Author: | Filed under: babble soft, entrepreneurship, working mother | Tags: , , , , , | 4 Comments »

4 Comments on “Why I Don’t Want A Monster In My Pants – Target Marketing”

  1. 1 Naomi Dunford said at 9:56 PM on December 8th, 2007:

    I had a totally awesome response to this all typed in and then I walked away to deal with the baby. I came back and closed my browser like an idiot.

    Now I don’t even know what I said. But it was very witty and intelligent, I’m sure.

    Re: the comment about post-partum depression – you’re absolutely right. Everyone gets overwhelmed. But I think that if someone had said to me directly, “This is great for people with PPD” I probably would have been able to focus on that statement long enough to say, “Hey! I have PPD! This might help ME.”

    There are so many products marketing themselves to overwhelmed parents that we tend to tune them out. It’s almost more overwhelming to listen to them all.

  2. 2 Aruni said at 8:05 AM on December 9th, 2007:

    Hi Naomi – You are right about focusing the marketing message. I think a vast majority of women have some sort of baby blues after the baby is born and if they knew there was a tool like Babble Soft out there who could help them during that time then they really should know about! To date, 99.5% of them have not heard about us…that’s just a stat I pulled out of the air.

    Starting in the next couple of weeks I’m hopeful that those people will start knowing about us (at least on the Internet).

  3. 3 isabella mori said at 9:44 AM on December 10th, 2007:

    hi there, and great to meet you. i came her through neena – she had tagged you with my “favourite words” meme.

    yeah, identifying your perfect customer. an interesting exercise. and then the question: how exactly to you reach those anal retentive mothers?

    re publicity and marketing, for my other blog, i just attended a fascinating webinar on new social marketing, given by seth godin, among others. here are the notes.

  4. 4 Aruni said at 2:29 PM on December 10th, 2007:

    Thanks Isabella. I enjoyed the notes. I’ve seen Seth Godin mentioned in several places and now because of your comment I have finally subscribed to his blog. 🙂

    As I mentioned on Neena’s blog, I will try to answer the meme but it might not happen for a while b/c I have a lot of my work and holiday plate at the moment.