By Linda Forrest
This past week, there’s been a lot of brouhaha in the media about Baby Einstein and the refund that Disney, the parent company of Baby Einstein, is offering. The New York Times called the refund offer “a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect,” a damning admission and a triumphant affirmation for those who believe, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, that television under the age of two is, in fact, damaging to children, impeding their language development and at the very least, not improving their cognitive ability, an audacious claim that was made in the early days of baby videos.
In my personal opinion, it’s very interesting to see a company as powerful as Disney subject itself to the financial loss and damage to its image that is inevitable by offering this refund. With more than one-third of American households having at least one Baby Einstein DVD and the company offering $15.99 for up to four DVDs per household, the potential cost is significant. (Disney, however, has a gazillion dollars and is unlikely to feel any real pain from this exercise.) The reasons for it doing so are up for debate, but the company’s detractors say it stems from a pending Federal Trade Commission complaint against the company for making false claims about the “educational value” of such videos, while Disney says a money-back guarantee is standard policy and available to any dissatisfied customer. Who is to say what the real reason is.
There’s no group of people more ardent about their beliefs and their methods than dedicated parents and so this recent battle has been heated. Largely fought between the Walt Disney Company and the Center for Commercial-Free Childhood, a group that self-identifies as a “coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups, parents, and individuals who care about children,” the fight has more recently become a mud-slinging brawl between the CCFC’s leader and the general manager of the Baby Einstein brand.
It’s significant to note that while trying to put together this post, I was unable to access the vitriolic letter that the president of Baby Einstein had posted, targeted at the CCFC’s leader, so inundated is the Baby Einstein web site; whether it’s media commentators, marketing communications professionals or parents flocking to the site, I can’t say. All that I can hope is that some marketing communications representative from Disney saw the letter, thought better of it and removed it from the site. Bits and pieces of the ill-advised posting are discussed here.
As a young parent, I have strong opinions about this issue, but I’m not willing to share them here. It’s up to each family how they operate their households and what they expose their children to; so long as that responsibility is undertaken with careful consideration and respect for the children involved, who is anyone else to judge what other parents do?
I’m confident in saying that entire research papers or books could be written on the complex marketing history of the Baby Einstein brand. It’s a conversation that delves into the sociological and philosophical responsibilities and roles of companies that market to children and their parents, and certainly, while interesting, extends well beyond the scope of this post.
As marketers, what simple lessons can we learn from this exercise? As another blogger so eloquently put it, “Why do brands make promises that they can’t keep or [worse] over extend an offering? The truth is, if it sounds too good to be true it likely is.”
If a company as large and powerful as Disney with legions of marketing professionals on staff can flub its marketing message and compound the goof by reacting angrily to its opponents in a public forum, then it can happen to any of us if we’re not careful. Carefully craft your marketing messages, make promises that you can deliver and always, ALWAYS, mind your Ps and Qs when you’re talking to the marketplace. Or suffer the consequences.
