Moms are Rating Everything. . .Well, Sort of!

Posted on | January 12, 2009 |

by Dr. Mary Lou Roberts

The Wall Street Journal just publicized a study of what researchers Penn, Schoen and Berland call the “New Information Shoppers.” It’s not surprising to those of us who’ve followed research on the growing importance of consumer ratings/reviews, but it does indicate that the trend continues.

It reminded me of a site one of my students brought to our attention lately; did you know there’s a site on which moms rate car shopping experiences for the benefit of other moms? It’s an interesting site. Like any other car site, you can search by makes, models, body styles of cars. MotherProof lets you shop by life stage. What a great idea, because it’s highly relevant to what moms require of their cars!

It’s not the typical ratings site, though, on which any visitor can post a rating. The site is among several owned by Cars.com. MotherProof has a staff of moms, from various stages in the family life cycle, who do the ratings. To keep visitors coming back, they offer a lot of other car-related information for moms. When I visited the site they had an article on travel mugs, for instance.

Marketers can look at this in several ways. It’s obviously marketer content, not user-generated. How credible does that make it to potential car buyers? Even with that in mind, doesn’t the relevance of this niche site make sense? Does that give marketers in other product categories any ideas? It certainly gives car makers an option for targeted advertising with content relevant to the site’s audience.

Overall, looks like a good idea as long as the site continues to be transparent about what they do!