The Brands of Hillary and Britney – What to Say to your Kids

My 9 year old daughter is really coming of age. She is eagerly paying attention to the events that take place around her each day. Much to my chagrin, the television has become a new source of information for her. Last week while watching the morning news, a segment was done on Hillary Clinton and highlighted a key turning point in her life. Evidently when Hillary was young she wrote a letter to NASA asking what exactly she should do to prepare herself to become an astronaut. Their response was to “become a man, there are no female astronauts”. This was clearly a pivotal moment in her life and she swore she would not let having the wrong plumbing get in her way. Ever.

Upon hearing of this great injustice, my daughter decides to pummel me with questions:

 “How do you get to be the President? Why is it such a big deal for a girl to be President? Why hasn’t there been a girl President? Are you going to vote for her because she is a girl? Are you going to vote for her at all? (And totally unrelated but due to the follow up story on the news) Why is Britney Spears in the hospital and how did her little sister get a baby in her belly?”

This was all before coffee!

I realized at that moment that the reception to marketing messages begins at home. Marketing especially to women, is wrapped in so many more communications that just magazine ads and TV commercials. It smacked me in the head that my daughters, my friends, my mom, every female out there is being bombarded by news and politics and that even in the best of objective journalism, there is always the “spin”.

For the record, I addressed my daughters concerns in order:

1. We elect a president by voting, it’s called an election and the one with the most votes wins.
2. It’s a big deal for a girl to be President because there hasn’t been one yet and I have no good explanation why there hasn’t been one yet!
3. I am going to vote for the best candidate not because of their gender but because they are the most qualified and I haven’t made up my mind yet.
4. Britney clearly doesn’t have a Mom as wonderful as you do and if she did, neither of the girls would be where they are now! (My own personal marketing effort with a target market of 3: two girls, one boy).

Hillary is a brand. So is Britney. We don’t even have to use their last names. They are catapulted into our lives on TV, in tabloid headlines and on entertainment Web sites. We watch every move they make, their stumbles and triumphs replayed for us over and over. If you miss it on the news, catch it on YouTube. It is symbolic of our times that two such different women share opening headline status on the Today Show.

Hillary has thrown herself into the boys’ club house. She is showing us what the potential leader of the free world looks like in lipstick and heels. She needs to be careful that her skirt isn’t too short or her blouse too low.  She mustn’t be too sensitive or she’ll be accused of playing the “girl” card. She has to find the perfect balance between diplomat and bitch, “first lady” and “first lady President”. She wants to be seen as capable and tough and yet wins market share when she is moved to tears in a public forum.  Positioning her is one of the most delicate marketing challenges ever seen in politics.

Britney is a brand too. Here is what women learn from her message: This is what you don’t want to become; this is what you don’t want your daughters to become; this is what happens when it all goes wrong. Her life, a bizarre combination of soap opera and reality-series, illustrates for us what happens when the fairy tale goes awry. Sweet child turned child-star: makes it big in a success story that could only happen in America, and then implodes with the same super-sized fanfare she received during her well documented rise to fame.

Two American Dream stories as told by the media on all fronts: two women who have left their own unique mark on this moment in history. The woman who would be President and the Pop Princess who would fall from grace. Watching the contrast between these two brands illustrates how complex is it to raise kids, especially girls in this age of media saturation.

I hope my daughters turn out more like Hillary than Britney, but mostly I am hoping that they will build their own American Girl Story and they will turn out to be just really good women.

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