Strategy & Brand

Children’s brands have the potential to shape children’s lifelong interests, thoughts, goals, desires, habits, and health…

Driving destructive trends and bombarding children with advertisements for unhealthy products impacts their lifelong wellness and society as a whole by impacting the lifestyles, capabilities, and objectives of our future decision-makers. Children’s brands should be held to the highest standards of conscience, responsibility, and excellence.

The Obesity Society’s 2009 study on children’s eating habits has proven that breakfast cereal doesn’t have to be neon colored and sugary for children to enjoy their breakfast experience (1). In fact, when served low sugar cereals, children eat healthier serving sizes, drink more juice, and eat more fruit with their meal (2). So, what if, instead of selling kids junk cereal, we sold them cereal that helped develop healthy lifelong eating habits?

What if we applied everything we know about branding, to making kids want things that are actually good for them? What if the point was not to build everything and anything that we could get children to buy, but to actually build something that combined the shared wants and needs of children and their parents? What if?

Raising girls is tough.

Raising confident, curious, inspired, courageous, authentic, well-rounded, well-educated young women who don’t feel pressured to conform to the world’s view of perfection is beyond daunting. We’re looking for parents of 7th, 8th, and 9th grade girls willing to talk honestly about parenting girls.

We’re setting out to radically improve the lives of girls. We’re conducting a short 6 question parent survey as part of our ongoing research.

If you’re a parent of a 7th, 8th, or 9th grade girl, you can lend your insights here:

If you know other parents working hard to raise inspired young women, please pass this survey along so they can share their wealth of heard-won insights.

View the 2010 Threats to Girlhood Report

Threats to Girlhood include all of the issues, mindsets, factors, trends, and circumstances that impact girls’ lifelong health, wellness, happiness, and ability to succeed. Identifying current Threats to Girlhood is an important step towards advancing the well being of girls, the possibilities for women, and the strength of communities.  The 2010 Threats to Girlhood report issued by BlackDog’s foundation Serious Play for Serious Girls provides a collective view detailing the breadth and depth of the challenges that girls face.  Good brands will use this report to guard against inflicting these challenges developed as an outcome of their actions.
Emerging research on the state of girlhood highlights the interconnection of girlhood threats. Education and poverty, body image issues and advertising, sexual abuse and self-harm, conformism and commercialism; the issues threatening our girls aren’t isolated and unrelated.  Radically reducing Threats to Girlhood will require that we, collectively, work to improve all the interconnected causes along the way, not just the side effects.

No one single parent, politician, celebrity role model, company, organization, product, publication, or advertisement is solely responsible for the development of girlhood threats. We are all, however, responsible for the ways in which we contribute to these threats or fail to contribute to their solution. Radically reducing Threats to Girlhood requires a holistic solution: an out-of-the-box and into-the-hands-of decision-makers solution that takes the whole girl, the world she lives in, and the interconnection of the threats facing her, all into account.

This report is certainly not exhaustive, but we hope it will help show the scope of the problem and the urgent need for a new perspective. Because Threats to Girlhood are continually changing, shifting, and evolving, this is an ongoing project intended to continue addressing threats and working towards solutions.

We believe that research shouldn’t be remanded to vaults and scholarly journals, so if your research helps identify a Threat to Girlhood or a solution to a girlhood threat, we hope you’ll pass it along for possible inclusion in the report. Please send your stats, facts, and insights on girlhood threats, along with a copy of the published research or report in which the insights appear, to us for review.

All children’s brands should be guided by an internalized dictum to “first, do no harm” that aligns organizational purpose, business strategy, brand management, and the optimal development of children. This sworn commitment requires a guiding philosophy that holds collective ability and judgment accountable, demands respect for scientific discovery, and vows to regard the holistic well being of children and childhood above all other competing concerns. It also requires an adopted practice of responsibility and professionalism dedicated to promoting the highest standards and respect for each developmental stage and phase, guarding the season of childhood.

Children need inspired playthings to help them tackle real world issues. Brands are either meeting the demand with constructive tools, placating children with shallow entertainment, or are selling out by buying into the notion that what they produce, promote, and contribute is inconsequential to the cultural realities of our day. If companies don’t begin adopting actionable, responsible standards rooted in high ideals, transparency, health, and holistic wellbeing, the industry will become subject to restrictive legislation.

There is no shortage of threats to childhood: cultural challenges to combat, stigmas and stereotypes to overcome, and chaos to decode. What is sparse, are companies that guard the season of childhood, regard their contribution as a vocation, and that champion the role and opportunity to proactively influence the healthy real life needs of impressionable young people.

Brands don’t exist in vacuums- they impact, influence, and shape our global ecology.