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AS DAVE SIEGEL, the president of WonderGroup, a marketing firm, steps onto the stage, the lights dim inside Ballroom A at the Disney Yacht Club Resort’s conference center in Orlando. With the click of his laptop keypad, Siegel activates a PowerPoint presentation. On the giant screen to his left, a photograph appears: a grimacing, gun-slinging woman, a cowboy hat cocked back on her head. Underneath her picture is the legend THERE’S A NEW MOM IN TOWN. The room echoes with the whistling theme song of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The audience shudders with nervous laughter.

It is May 2004, and Siegel is giving the keynote talk at Kid Power Xchange, the country’s foremost kids’ marketing conference, which is held annually in Disney World’s capital city. Every year hundreds of marketing executives from companies ranging from Benjamin Moore Paints to PepsiCo to Disney itself — as well as Strottman International, Logistix Kids, KidShop, the Geppetto Group, S.T.A.R.S. for Kidz, the Kaleidoscope Group, and Eventive Marketing — gather here to network with peers and potential clients and learn about new strategies for marketing to children. One of their perennial challenges is working with the mothers of those children — or “getting around the gatekeeper.” Until recently, many marketers say they enjoyed an all but industry-wide field day with Baby Boomer moms. These mothers felt so guilty about being career-focused that they often did not have the emotional wherewithal to say no to their kids; as a result, marketing practices went largely unchecked. But the Boomers are now becoming grandparents, and as Siegel’s presentation confirms, there is a new mom in town who categorically rejects the Boomer mom’s MO. To illustrate this contrast, Siegel projects In and Out lists on the screen, to scattered groans from the floor. As he clicks through his slides, the following phrases materialize: “Super Mom” is Out and “Good Mom” is In; “Indulgence relieves guilt” is Out and “Happy and involved with family” is In; “Achievement” is Out and “Enrichment” is In. Meet the Generation-X mother, he says.

THE LEAST NURTURED GENERATION

Generation X comprises 48 million Americans, the oldest born in 1965 and the youngest in 1978 (some research firms put the end year at 1981). This group was famously characterized as “the 20-something generation” in a 1990 Time cover article:

They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder. They have few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own. They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial. They hate yuppies, hippies and druggies. They postpone marriage because they dread divorce. They sneer at Range Rovers, Rolexes and red suspenders.

They also, by all accounts, still hate to be called Generation X. The name originated with the British punk-pop band that launched Billy Idol to 1980s MTV video stardom, but it was adopted as the slacker identifier after the publication of Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which chronicled the wanderings of a group of “underemployed, overeducated, intensely private and unpredictable” twenty-somethings with “nowhere to direct their anger, no one to assuage their fears and no culture to replace their anomie.”

The slacker generation has finally matured into bona fide adulthood (the oldest turned forty in 2005). In spite of having spent its youth reviling commercial culture, Gen-X has ripened into a desirable demographic for marketers. Today two-thirds of mothers with children under twelve are Gen-Xers (Boomers account for 26 percent), and their ascent into motherhood has paralleled the ascent of the zero-to-three market.

To understand the way a Gen-X mom thinks, marketers assemble a composite picture, based on articles, sociological studies, and survey and focus-group research. They also rely increasingly on ethnographic research, since many people with advanced degrees in anthropology are entering the field of marketing. First, marketers paint a portrait of childhood for that group, the first in which large numbers were raised in daycare. Forty percent were latchkey kids: those who were not in daycare brought house keys to school so they could open the doors to their empty homes while their parents were at work. And by 1980 one American child in six lived with a single parent — the mother in most cases. Some observers estimate that up to half of the families of Gen-X children divorced. The society in which Gen-X came of age didn’t inspire much hope, for as the Time cover story said, it was filled with “racial strife, homelessness, AIDS, fractured families and federal deficits.” As a 2004 study of generational differences concluded, “Generation X went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history.”

HOME ALONE

The one activity that united Gen-X children was watching TV. According to a report issued by the Carnegie Council on Children titled All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure, in 1980, by the time the average American teenager graduated from high school, she had spent more time watching TV than attending school or being with her parents. With mothers at work and children alone at home, the latchkey phenomenon did not go unexploited by marketers. Indeed, the 1980s marked the first time in American history that advertisers and marketers had unchaperoned access to children, an unprecedented opportunity to sell to young customers while they were alone. While the sponsors of the television shows that Baby Boomers had grown up watching — The Howdy Doody Show, The Mickey Mouse Club — had targeted children directly, they did so with the knowledge that parents were watching alongside their children, acting as gatekeepers. With no parents watching, however, there were no gatekeepers. Concern that advertisers might mine this vulnerability motivated children’s rights groups to push the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate TV ads aimed at kids. In 1978 the FTC issued a report contending that commercials targeting children under the age of eight were intrinsically unethical, since children of that age were developmentally unable to discern the subtle differences between fact and fantasy. The report further asserted that babies and children were typically exposed to 20,000 commercials a year. The investigation and the report were quashed by lobbying efforts on behalf of the advertising industry.

By the 1980s toy companies began producing program-length commercials — called PLCs in the industry — by wrapping story lines around product marketing. PLCs became integral to the launch of mass-market toy lines. Programs such as He-Man and Masters of the Universe (Mattel), G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, Care Bears, and Strawberry Shortcake were all created with the explicit purpose of selling the eponymous toys to children. By 1985 all of the top ten best-selling toys had their own television shows. By 1987 about 60 percent of all toys sold in the United States were based on licensed characters, a dramatic increase from about 10 percent in 1980.

The other major turning point in Gen-X’s childhood was the release in 1977 of Star Wars, a movie that transformed toy boxes forever. Disney had always timed the promotion of licensed merchandise to coincide with its animated feature films; it had originated the practice in 1937 by licensing the cartoon stars of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to several toy companies months in advance of the release. But the success of the Star Wars action figures and toys blew away all previous licensing statistics. As movies alone, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back earned a phenomenal $870 million in box office sales by 1983 (the year Return of the Jedi was released). But that sum looked puny compared to what the merchandise pulled in: licensed Star Wars products had grossed $2 billion by then. These numbers were so staggering that they changed the toy business: in the post–Star Wars era, entertainment media drove toys’ success.

As a result, Generation X’s very sense of play became different from that of any generation before it.

SECURITY AND AFFECTION

In Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood, the historian Gary Cross chronicles the story of American toys, material culture, and their impact on families during the twentieth century. He observes that beginning in Teddy Roosevelt’s era, “scientific childhood” and toy advertising, commercials — and toys themselves — were aimed at both parents and children. Exploiting nostalgia was the advertisers’ chief ploy. The toys were not all that different from those the parents had grown up with; the toy industry understood the draw for parents of revisiting their own youth through their children. From the start of the twentieth century, advertisers also played on children’s, especially boys’, longing to forge a relationship with their otherwise remote, authoritarian fathers. A 1918 advertisement for Lionel model trains was directed at boys, to be sure, but the real lure was that the toy would hook fathers into playing with them: “Take Dad into your partnership … Make him your pal.” Even fad toys were historically pegged to a character in popular culture that children and their parents enjoyed as a family. In the 1930s, for example, movie characters such as Buck Rogers and stars like Shirley Temple became so popular that their licensed likenesses sparked massive toy crazes. But these toys were calculated to appeal to children and parents alike. To parents, these items either conformed to their idealized notions of children and childhood (Mickey Mouse and Shirley Temple, for example) or inspired excitement about the future, technological innovation, or American heroism (Buck Rogers and Roy Rogers).

But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the convergence of the Star Wars licensing phenomenon, the rise of PLCs, and cultural shifts in work and family life — characterized by single working parents and latchkey children — marked the start of a permanent change in kids’ marketing. For the first time, Cross notes, advertisers actively strove to separate parent and child, aiming to divide and conquer. To marketers it was the birth of the “nag factor.” But in the broader social context, the chief point of connection between parents, children, and toys was no longer in playing together: it was in buying something.

The toys of the late 1970s and 1980s were the first to be completely foreign to parents. Rather than exploiting nostalgia as an advertising ploy, toy makers and marketers joined forces to sharpen the line separating the world of working parents and the rapidly evolving youth culture brought about by latchkey children and the rise of TV as babysitter. The toys of this period — and the play they dictated — were tied to a consumer culture that was itself tied to television shows and movies that parents were too busy to watch. Many of these new toys were action figures that adults could not relate to. Many of the characters on which these figures were based were not even human. They were monsters or androids or alien life forms that were far removed from Eisenhower-era values such as courage or a better future through technology. These toys came with prepackaged characteristics, as defined by their role in the television show or movie from which they had emerged. Any American child of that era knew that a Star Wars Land Cruiser could not fly; it hovered. A parent who unwittingly broke these rules while trying to play with his child revealed himself to be a rube — not the partner that Lionel Trains had promised sixty years before as the ultimate reward for playing with its toy.

Toy makers, wanting to capitalize on the action-figure formula for girls, began to create little girls’ characters that were intended as licensing properties from the start. A studio called Those Characters from Cleveland, part of the American Greetings card company, was the first to do this, with a character named Strawberry Shortcake. Her curly-headed, freckle-faced, old-fashioned cute look was in fact a product of sophisticated marketing. Strawberry Shortcake’s diminutive appearance and rather superficial message of “friendship” appealed to overworked Boomer parents who, too overwhelmed to vet toys carefully, would gravitate on impulse to anything that seemed innocuous. But the Strawberry Shortcake character was designed to attract Gen-X girls, whose notoriously unstable upbringing made them feel vulnerable and insecure. Those Characters from Cleveland chose the strawberry theme after market surveys showed that little girls connected emotionally with strawberries and felt “security and affection” in relation to them.

WOULD PREFER TO STAY AT HOME

Given the bleak portrait of their childhoods, one might expect Gen-X women to be numb and emotionally unavailable as mothers. In fact, the opposite is true. Because they did not have stability as children, marketers observe, stability means a great deal more to Gen-X mothers now that they have their own families. Indeed, as a group, they do appear to be more stable than their mothers were: 70 percent are married. But a Gen-X mother is not a true traditionalist. According to market research, getting married is not as important to her as providing a stable household for her children; if she doesn’t meet the right person, she will either defer marriage or will choose to have children on her own. According to 2004 census data, the number of college-educated mothers who have never been married and have children under eighteen has tripled since 1990. Many of these women, sociologists say, have chosen single motherhood. Indeed, the national support group Single Mothers by Choice can point to Gen-X women’s sensibilities as a factor contributing to the doubling of its membership in just three years; though the group is twenty-five years old, it grew from twelve chapters in 2002 to twenty-four nationwide by the end of 2005. The average age of the Single Mothers by Choice is thirty-five, and nearly all have completed college. About 52 percent of the mothers conceived a child by donor insemination, and approximately 25 percent adopted. About 20 percent became pregnant with a “known donor” or sex partner but are raising their children alone.

Marketers have also learned that Gen-X mothers’ top priority is spending as much time as possible with their kids. The 2005 National Study of Employers, conducted by the Families and Work Institute, revealed striking shifts in work patterns that can be attributed to Gen-X parents’ insistence on maintaining an acceptable balance between work and family. Small businesses, the study showed, are increasingly offering employees flexible hours, while large organizations provide benefits that have direct costs, such as retirement funds and on-site daycare programs. Small companies seem to believe that without flexible work hours, Gen-X mothers might simply quit, if they have the financial freedom to do so. “Of the 92% of employers that offered at least eight work-life initiatives, including flexible work schedules, family leave and child care, nearly half, 47%, reported they provide these initiatives to recruit and retain employees,” said the study; 25 percent reported that they provide these choices to enhance productivity and commitment.

Gen-X mothers do not share with Baby Boomer mothers the imperative to drive hard on the career track. According to WonderGroup’s survey research, 87 percent of Gen-X moms with kids of twelve and under said they would rather stay at home to raise their children than work at an office. If they can afford to, many do just that.

STORIES OF THE “OLD DAYS”

Gen-Xers are famous for their hard-won self-sufficiency. Some speculate that their resourcefulness and flexibility in adulthood result from a childhood in which adults were often scarce or frazzled. However, having grown up with shaky role models, Gen-X continues to nurture a guarded view of authority and a deep attachment to individuality (32 percent of Gen-X women have tattoos). Gen-X mothers are less likely to rely on their own mothers’ parenting advice than previous generations have done. Take, for example, a typical Gen-X mother deciding which brand of baby food to buy for her first child, as outlined by marketers Maria T. Bailey and Bonnie W. Ulman in Trillion-Dollar Moms: Marketing to a New Generation of Mothers. “Not surprisingly, the Baby Boomer grandmother will tell her how things were when she was a child and what brands she used to feed her babies as a young mother,” they write. “The Generation X mom will discount stories of the ‘old days’ in an attempt to forget her own unstable childhood and avoid recreating it for her child.” The authors also observe, however, that the Gen-X mother generally regards her own mother as a peer — perhaps an outcome of being raised in a single-mother household — and will listen to her advice as she would to that of a friend.

Friends are extremely important to Gen-X mothers, perhaps even more important than their family of origin. Gen-X mothers depend on friends for everything from emotional support to shopping tips. Market researchers explain that as children, Gen-Xers were often compelled to rely more heavily on their peer groups than on parents for support, and they continue to do so as mothers. The rise of mother-and-baby play groups and online parenting communities such as BabyCenter.com and iVillage reflect the Gen-X mom’s need to connect with other women going through the same life stage to compare notes, commiserate, and offer advice. It also explains at least part of the runaway success of Baby Einstein: Gen-X moms love Julie Aigner-Clark.

A MOM LIKE YOU

Each video or DVD in the Baby Einstein series ends with a segment in which Julie Aigner-Clark introduces herself as the series creator — and as a mom. Gen-X mothers, according to Disney’s market research, watch this segment repeatedly. One reason seems to be that Aigner-Clark is exceptionally ordinary — but not in the conventional way. Nearly every demographic and psychographic group in the United States sees her as one of their own. She has a broadcaster’s nonaccent, and, in the American transient tradition, she is from a middle-class everywhere. She grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, was living in suburban Atlanta when she made the first Baby Einstein video, and now lives outside of Denver. Her demeanor and sensibility bridge major culture gaps. On the one hand, she is cheerful and unpretentious, projecting an image of a suburban heartland stay-at-home mom who always has cupcakes and neat crafts projects waiting for the neighborhood gang. On the other hand, she has the hyphenated last name, cultural values, and educational pedigree of an upper-class urban career mother who schedules play dates for her toddler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Born in the mid-1960s, she sits astride the cusp of the Baby Boom generation and Generation X. She appears to be Every-Mom.

Disney focus groups have revealed that Gen-X mothers see that in the final segment Aigner-Clark is talking to them as a mom herself. Mothers connect with her as if she were a friend. Thus they support her and promote her work to other friends. First-time mothers rave about Baby Einstein videos to other first-timers. The network of Baby Einstein devotees grew quickly, in part because of the rise of e-mail and the Web in the 1990s, but also because of the growing number of mother-and-baby groups flourishing at the time. The company was able to establish immediate credibility with mothers and, soon afterward, with parenting magazines, which conferred awards on the company during its first few years. Viral marketing through new moms was so powerful that until 2003 — when Disney had owned the company for two years — there was no formal advertising for Baby Einstein products. None was needed. All promotion was by word of mouth, from one mother to the next.

Moms’ viral marketing is still the keystone of Disney’s promotional plan. The Baby Einstein Web site highlights a section called Family to Family, in which parents (mostly mothers) can share their product experiences for others to read. They invoke the same themes today as they did when the videos first hit the market. They rave about how much babies love it (“We started playing Baby Mozart and Baby Bach videos when our daughter was 5 weeks old … As soon as that Disney logo and jingle starts and the Baby Einstein caterpillar appears, she is hooked!”). Mothers appreciate being able to have a few moments to themselves, and they believe that the baby is learning something in the process (“My 9 month old has loved the videos and DVD’s since he was 2 months old. Not only have they bought me precious minutes (and hours) of time to do things like ‘take a shower,’ BUT ALSO I have actually seen his recognition skills develop,” swears another mother). Many of the mothers thank Aigner-Clark personally, addressing her warmly by her first name, as if she were a member of their mothers’ group.

Gen-X mothers are also inspired by Aigner-Clark’s ability to balance family with work. They like that she made the first video herself and that her business was inspired by wanting to spend as much time with her baby as possible rather than by the ambition to launch a multimillion-dollar company that would become a profitable division of Disney. Aigner-Clark is the archetypically resourceful, self-reliant Gen-X adult. To shoot the first video, she and her husband borrowed a friend’s video camera and set up an improvised production studio in the basement of their home in Alpharetta, Georgia. Between learning how to use a computer-based video-editing program and raising their toddler, it took the couple about a year to complete the inaugural video. When they were finished, Aigner-Clark began distributing the tape at local mothers’ groups. Moms loved it immediately. Within about a year she had sold 40,000 Baby Einstein videotapes. The next title, Baby Mozart, came out the following year and sold 60,000 copies within eight months. After being in business a little more than a year, the Baby Einstein Company posted more than $1 million in gross sales; by 1999, Aigner-Clark had sold her one millionth video and had rung up $4.5 million.

What started with a single video advertised by word of mouth and distributed to local mommy-and-me groups is now a major division at Disney, featuring sixteen videos, fifty books, sets of flash cards for infants (marketed as Discovery Cards), puppets, mobiles, bouncy seats, shape sorters, stackers, teething rings, and other products emblazoned with the video’s signature animal-puppet characters. But Disney has tried to downplay its ownership of Baby Einstein, because mothers’ loyalty to the brand is dependent on the illusion that they are connected to Aigner-Clark through a grass-roots network.

Gen-X mothers also like Aigner-Clark’s statement that she was motivated by a desire to share her passion for art and literature with her daughter, not to make her a genius. They like her humility. In interviews and talks, Aigner-Clark appears as astonished by her success as someone who has won the lottery. In a down-to-earth tone — and a voice that is naturally infant-soothing — Aigner-Clark told me the story of deciding to stay at home after the birth of her first child, Aspen, in 1994. A former English and art teacher, she wanted to expose her child to things she felt were of artistic value — classical music, seminal artworks, canonical poetry — but the schlep from the suburbs to museums in the city was not easy and, frankly, not much fun for mother or baby. Books were often a nuisance, since her daughter seemed more interested in chewing them than in appreciating their artistic qualities. Aigner-Clark recalls thinking, “Am I the only mom who wants to develop the love of humanities and fine arts in her children?” Probably not, she decided.

And she surely was not the only mom looking for a decent video for her baby to watch. The options for preschoolers were growing — Elmo’s World videos were very popular by that point — but there seemed to be virtually nothing educational for babies or toddlers. Aigner-Clark had read in magazine articles that babies can absorb foreign languages before they are one year old. She wondered if she could produce what she thought of as a video board book, using artful shots of playthings that would capture babies’ attention combined with words in different languages and classical music in the background. But, as she admits, she is no expert.

UNIQUE GIFTS

Experts occupy a precarious position in the heart and mind of the Gen-X mother. Since she does not consider her own mother an expert on child-rearing, she is likely to compare notes with friends. If she wants a more authoritative source, she tends to rely on books by noted pediatricians, such as T. Berry Brazelton, William and Martha Sears, Penelope Leach, and Richard Ferber. But unlike previous generations of mothers, who religiously followed the advice of the celebrity pediatrician of the day, the Gen-X mother may not adhere to any one orthodoxy if it doesn’t suit her own assessment of her family’s needs. Most Gen-X mothers practice some form of “attachment parenting,” which advocates a high level of closeness and connection between parents and children. Although Baby Boomers tend to see this practice as impractical and even indulgent, Gen-X parents embrace it to varying degrees.

Market research suggests that Gen-X mothers would rather err on the side of being too close, too involved, too loving. They hold themselves accountable for providing a happy and, above all, secure home life. As the marketers Maria Bailey and Bonnie Ulman point out, “While Baby Boomer moms believed it took a village to raise a child, Gen-X moms believe it takes a family.” It is not that they necessarily expect life to be perfect; their own childhood experiences in many ways compelled them to adopt a self-reliant and clear-eyed view of life. And they do not expect their children to be perfect.

Gen-X mom says she does not care if her child is a genius. She believes that her child has “unique gifts” that make him special. Above all, she wants him to have fun, to make friends, and to be happy. Companies that failed to take note of Gen-X mom’s sensitivities suffered in the early years of this century. The neurotically named toy company Neurosmith went out of business in 2003, as did the toy-store chain Zany Brainy. To steer away from the Boomer “education” stigma, Fisher-Price phased out its Baby Smartronics line of infant toys and changed its tag line to “Laugh, Learn, Grow” to reflect Generation X’s preference for emotional stability over intellectual prowess.

Interestingly, however, “learn” still has to be there in some form. Though the Gen-X mother may say she doesn’t care how smart her children are, her spending patterns tell a different story. Many marketers have contended that although she views her concern as a rejection of the Boomer value of prizing achievement over support, she is still a product of that value herself. That is, Gen-X mothers are not just members of the first generation to have been raised in daycare. They are also the first to have come of age during the baby genius phenomenon. Gen-X moms say they don’t like toys that are aggressively marketed as educational, but they buy them anyway.

One marketing study revealed that Gen-X moms will even lie about fast-tracking their babies. When new moms were asked if they regularly observed other mothers pushing their babies to learn academic skills at an age earlier than what is expected, more than 85 percent said they had, but only 33 percent admitted to doing so themselves. In marketing surveys, such a discrepancy usually indicates that interviewees are underreporting participation in activities they disapprove of. They don’t want to be, or to see themselves as being, aggressive Boomers, fast-tracking their infants’ education; they would prefer that educational products do the fast-tracking for them, albeit tacitly. Interestingly, this paradox has allowed companies to attract both Boomers and Generation X as customers. Market research shows that while the Gen-Xers are drawn in by the “learning is fun” line, Boomer grandparents are taken by the academic undertone. This is a coup, because grandparents are big spenders. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey, the fifty-five to sixty-four age group spends more per capita on toys than the twenty-five to forty-four age group.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Marketers have also learned to play on Gen-X parents’ abiding childhood fear of being left alone — a fear they go out of their way to avoid re-creating in their own children. Fisher-Price learned this the hard way in the early 1990s, when the first Gen-X women were becoming mothers. Marketers knew very little about their behavior and, frankly, did not register the significance of this emerging demographic. They did, however, know a great deal about Boomer moms, and most marketing efforts were concentrated on developing relationships with that group. Recent research had revealed that new mothers and fathers often clashed over who would attend to the crying baby in the middle of the night. Boomer mothers had complained of a fundamental inequity in parenting responsibilities. They were under enormous pressure to compete with men in the workplace, and to have to endure the lash of sexism at home seemed intolerable. The friction was stressing their self-esteem, their marriages, and their quality of life. If a company offered a product that would help solve this problem, mothers said they would buy it — and if it had some educational value, all the better.

These findings inspired Fisher-Price to develop a musical electronic mobile that could be activated by remote control. The TV ad created for the launch of the mobile was designed to dramatize the conflict and, of course, to portray the mobile as the solution. The spot opened with a husband and wife in bed, asleep. Then a baby’s wail is heard. The husband and wife awaken under a cloud of dark resentment and bicker groggily about who is going to attend to the baby. That marked the “Before” scenario. The “After” scenario returned to the same peacefully sleeping couple, but this time, when the baby wails, a hand reaches for the remote control and pushes a button. Without either parent having to rally to full consciousness, the mobile is activated, and the baby is shown cooing contentedly as a soothing lullaby calms her back to sleep. Husband and wife snuggle, blissfully dead to the world. Fisher-Price was pleased with the ad. The research was solid, the mobile was charming and practical, and the ad was funny and engaging. Before running it live, however, the marketing department presented it to a test market of new mothers.

The mothers did not like it — in fact, they couldn’t stand it. They were offended that a mother would be portrayed as so unfeeling. What kind of self-centered princess would lie in bed dickering over domestic duties when her baby was in distress? Was a little sleep so important to this woman that she would endanger her child’s sense of security? No, these mothers would not buy this electronic mobile. What could be more obnoxiously yuppie-ish than buying a gadget that would swap a mother’s love for convenience?

Fisher-Price marketing executives were astonished. Had they misinterpreted the findings of the market research? Where were all those women who had said they wanted an easy way out of power struggles with their husbands at two o’clock in the morning? The researchers retraced their steps, conducted additional interviews, and updated their files. Ultimately, they realized that their target mother had disappeared. In the interval between the initial research and the final ad, a massive demographic shift had occurred. Fisher-Price was meeting the new