By Allendra Letsome, NOW Vice President of Membership
We’re long past the days when young girls are shuffled off to Home Economics classes while the boys go to Metal Shop. Or are we?
This month, Sony launched its DigiDads project, a social marketing project aimed at the communities of dads who are blogging. These lucky fellows will be receiving Sony gear including BRAVIA televisions, Blu-ray players, Alpha DSLR cameras, Handycam camcorders, VAIO notebook computers and Reader e-books. The dads must then use the product, rate it on their blogs and ship it back to Sony. This marketing initiative was intended to mirror the social marketing and product reviews that the blogging moms have been doing for awhile. Sony believes that forcing the dads to ship the products back eliminates any concerns that the reviews might be biased. Sony may be right on that point, but I think they’re dead wrong on another.
Blogging moms are rarely offered cool stuff like this and never in a targeted project. According to blogger Melissa Lion, Recovering Californian, moms are usually only offered to do product reviews on diapers and laundry detergent. In a medium where the only things that should matter are your writing skills and your level of tech-competency, why are we still confronting gender stereotypes? Dads have to do laundry and change diapers, just as much as moms. And moms would like to document their children’s activities and read to them from an e-book as well.
So I say, let’s throw open the doors. Parents should blog about products for parents. And Sony and Huggies and all of the others need to wake up to the 21st century.