Written by Laura Bianchi, VP, Director of Strategy, Experiential Commerce, NA
Why her? Why not them?
We’ve all been there. The deck is polished, the strategy is tight and somewhere around slide four, the target comes to life: she’s a busy mom, she’s juggling work and family, she’s the one making the purchasing decisions.
Those who’ve worked with me long enough know that question is coming. The moment a project refers to a parenting audience as she, I’ll say something. The use of that pronoun isn’t incidental.
Ask most brands who their shopper is, and they’ll tell you, confidently with data, that she is. She shops, she decides, she manages the household. And they’re not entirely wrong. But they’re not entirely right, either. And the difference between those two things is costing us.
The data isn’t subtle. Women still carry a disproportionate share of household purchasing decisions—not just the act of buying, but the invisible architecture around it. The list-keeping. The reordering. The knowing that the toothpaste is almost out before anyone else has noticed. It’s not shopping as leisure. It’s shopping as operations.
And the industry has, for decades, built around that reality. Targeted her. Rewarded her loyalty. Optimized for her attention. In some ways, it’s been effective. In other ways, it’s been lazy. Because it never asked why she was the one holding the list in the first place.
That’s changing. Slowly, unevenly, but meaningfully. More households are actively redistributing that load. More partners are not just helping, but owning. Yet from a commerce perspective, we don’t actually know that much about what happens to shopper behavior when the load shifts. Because we never built the models for it. We built them for her.
Think about what happens when a partner takes over the household grocery order. To most retail platforms, that’s a new customer. The purchase history, the preferences, the loyalty status, none of it follows the household. It follows the login. The person who spent years building that relationship with a brand effectively disappears, and someone the algorithm has never met takes her place. The household didn’t churn. The model just couldn’t see it.
That’s the data gap. We have deep data on her as the default, and almost none on the household as a fluid, shifting unit. And as that unit shifts in real time, most brands are making decisions—about loyalty, personalization, acquisition—based on a model built for a dynamic that’s quietly becoming the exception.
Which makes me think of Mother’s Day.
Every year, the campaigns roll out. Celebrate her. Treat her. She does so much. And as a working mom, I can say she deserves that. But there’s something quietly contradictory about an industry that spends one week in May honoring the weight moms carry and the other fifty-one designing experiences that assume she’ll keep carrying it alone.
The most interesting question in commerce right now isn’t how to better target moms. It’s what happens when the load is shared, and whether we’ve built anything that actually supports that. Better tools for household collaboration. Loyalty that belongs to a home, not a login. Personalization that understands a family is a unit, not a single decision-maker in a demographic bracket.
So this Mother’s Day, by all means, celebrate the moms in your life. But if you’re in a boardroom this week and someone puts up a slide that says the shopper is she—ask the question. Why her? Why not them?
The brands that can answer that honestly are the ones building for what’s next.