Corporations Fear Moms

Women today can be, and do, just about anything. Yet when it comes to social activism, there's one role that women are increasingly falling back on: Mother.

In recent months, a women's gun control group called Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America successfully pressured Chipotle Starbucks and other major companies into taking a stand against firearms in their restaurants. 

A group of workers and activists identifying as “Walmart Moms” riled up Walmart by demanding the retail behemoth pay a fair wage. And women affiliated with Corporate Accountability International have used their “MomsNotLovinIt” campaign to pressure McDonald’s to stop marketing to children.

Mothers have been cajoling huge companies into changing their ways for more than a century. Though American women now have far greater choices and opportunities, the power of the "mom" has only increased. In part, that's because women are a huge consumer force. Globally, they control about $29 trillion in spending, according to a recent study from the Boston Consulting Group.

And companies obsessively focus on pleasing women and mothers. In the U.S., women are responsible for about 73 percent of consumer spending, said Michael Silverstein, the author of the study and a book called Women Want More.

Yet, the idea of "mom" that these companies and groups seem to rally around can seem a little old-fashioned. Companies often direct their marketing to women simply by “hiring a female spokesperson and coloring the product pink,” Silverstein said. A few years ago, Dell saw huge backlash after launching a line of pink laptops aimed at women.

Still, part of the success of this mom-led consumer activism is because companies are so eager to attract a more "traditional" image of moms to their brand.

“The companies that all these moms have been organizing around see moms as a demographic they explicitly target, which is part of the reason moms organizing is both so important and so effective,” said Anna Lappe, a mother of two who has helped organize the MomsNotLovinIt campaign.

"We may still be holding on to expectations of what motherhood means and we may feel like we have to play out a particular role," said Jenny Darroch, a marketing professor at Claremont Graduate University's Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management. 

"So when women protest in favor of things that favor their children, people may support them because they're acting in a way that people expect them to behave."