Ek reël in hierdie tyd aan ‘n
mini-seminaar vir LitNet oor die manne-beweging in Suid-Afrika (vir April). Tot 400 000
mans het op ‘n stadium godsdienstige byeenkomste bygewoon waar hulle nagedink
het oor hul rol as seun vir hul ouers, man vir hul vrou, pa vir hul kinders en
vriend vir hul maats. Duidelik is daar ‘n baie groot behoefte by vele mans om
hieroor na te dink.
Kyk byvoorbeeld na die volgende
video en watter appel op godsdiens, musiek, emosies, kommunikasie en man-wees
gemaak word:
Ek beplan dat hierdie reeks in
April van stapel sal loop. Tot dusver was die reaksies op hierdie beweging te
skrams, eensydig, veroordelend, oppervlakkig en oningelig om werklik nuttig te wees.
Die reaksies op die beweging
het wyd uiteengeloop. Daar was die siniese kritiek van sommige, die harde
veroordeling van die naïewiteit en eensydigheid van die geestelike inhoud, die
bevraagtekening van die begrip van manlikheid in die beweging en vele ander
aspekte.
Intussen het kombi’s vol mense, meestal nog jongerig, ongesteurd en in eindelose rye afgesit om die
een byeenkoms na die ander te gaan bywoon. Wat ook al die kritici kwytgeraak
het, het duidelik min invloed gehad.
Vele mense het gepraat oor die positiewe afloop daarvan. Die beweging het vele mense in
hul geestelike lewens versterk. En een na die ander byeenkoms het groter en
massiewer geword.
In ons komende LitNet seminaar
hoop ek sal ons kan dieper nadink oor die geestelike behoeftes van mense wat
ingetrek word by die manne-beweging (minder, maar ook: die vroue-beweging) en
hoe ‘n mens vanuit ‘n hoek van dieper nadink daaroor kan praat.
Daar is ‘n diepe begeerte,
besef ek al hoe meer, by mans om hulle
eie identiteit te verstaan. Hulle kyk na die wêreld, sien hoe gekompliseerd dit
is, besef hoe wreed dit is, ervaar by die werk en by hulle kinders se skole al
hoe meer waaraan mense blootgestel word en hoe hul kinders uitgedaag sal word.
En hulle wil praat oor hoe ‘n mens sinvol die reuse-taak kan aanpak om saam met/vir
hul vrou en met/vir hulle kinders ‘n sinvolle lewe moontlik te maak.
Hierdie behoefte word duidelik
gedryf deur ‘n innerlike bewoëndheid. Mans gee om. Vaderskap is ‘n intuïtiewe
refleks-aksie wat die diepste kant van die man aanraak en oopmaak vir hulle wat
naby aan hom is.
Ons weet dit almal: daar is
niks so ywerig, beskermend, liefdevol en opgewonde soos ‘n man wat pas pa
geword het nie. Die eerste reaksie om jou kind in jou hande vas te hou is 'n simbool van hoe 'n mens tot die einde van jou lewe sal voel.
Hoe taaier die wêreld word, hoe
sterker voel mans die uitdaging om ‘n goeie mens vir ander te wees. En hulle weet dit is belangrik om tuis te begin.
Dit is, dink ek, een van die
rede’s waarom mans op groot skaal die manne-beweging ondersteun.
Dit is boeiend dat veral
toegewyde mans die gesels oor hul man-wees in ‘n godsdienstige konteks wil
voer. Wat die vraag oproep: word daar in
die teologie en in die kerke genoeg aandag hieraan gegee? Op my boekrak staan een
publikasie oor manlike spiritualiteite. Verder is daar ‘n paar populêre tekste
(bv. Wild at Heart). Maar hoe word oor hierdie sake in ons konteks en in ons
land met sy eie behoeftes gepraat?
Tyd om dit meer aan die orde te
stel.
Ek hoop die komende seminaar op
LitNet waaraan verskeie bekende Suid-Afrikaanse teoloë gaan deelneem, gaan help
om die tema net nog meer aktueel te maak binne die teologie en in die
gevestigde kerke. Ons gaan hopelik reguit, billik, eerlik en diepsinnig oor die
tema kan praat. Dit raak die lewens van alle mense. Dit is ook ‘n tema wat die
kerk en teologie kan laat nadink oor hul eie identiteit en die verlangens van
hul lidmate en lesers.
Vandag lees ek in die NYT 'n nuwe, ander perspektief op hoe
‘n globale verskyning die manne-beweging is. En hoe baie mans byvoorbeeld oor
so ‘n simpel saak soos hul huistakies blog of konferensies gaan bywoon of
kampanje’s organiseer. Mans neem hul rol in die huisgesin ernstig op, vertel die artikel.
Dit is nie ‘n godsdienstige artikel nie, maar
die geen ‘n insig in hoe sommige mans in die res van die wêreld hulle man-wees
beleef.
Wat my tref in die artikel is
die behoefte van mans om in alle opsigte hul rol binne die gesin volwaardig en
met integriteit uit te voer. Die dae dat die pa die hoof is wat bedien word,
wat hiet en gebied, en omring word deur slaafse bedieners en bediendes, is
duidelik verby. Die moderne man weet hy het ‘n dienende rol om te speel, hy is
nie heer en meester nie, hy wil ook nie ‘n rondsukkelaar wees nie.
Hier is die artikel:
THE hapless, bumbling father is
a stock character in product marketing. He makes breakfast for dinner and is
incapable of handling, or sometimes even noticing, a soggy diaper. He tries
desperately to hide the crumb-strewn, dirt-streaked evidence of his poor
parenting before the mother gets home.
A Dove Men+Care advertisement
tries to reach men who are redefining the role of fatherhood.
This is an image that many
fathers who attended the Dad 2.0 Summit — a meeting of so-called daddy bloggers
and the marketers who want to reach them — have come to revile. They are proud
to be involved in domestic life and do not want to serve as the comic foil to
the supercompetent mother.
In the past, consumer-product
marketers weren’t all that concerned with what fathers thought — women, after
all, make the majority of purchasing decisions for households. But men are
catching up: In 2012 men spent an average of $36.26 at the grocery store per
trip, compared with $27.49 in 2004, according to data from Nielsen. Companies
see an opportunity to reach a new demographic.
The bloggers, for their part,
are using their influence to change the way marketers portray them. “The payoff
is huge if you get dads right,” says Jim Lin, vice president and digital
strategist at Ketchum Public Relations in San Francisco, a blogger at The Busy Dad
Blog and a father of two.
To put it another way, while
the mom space is crowded with players, the dad space has room for more. So
there is big money to be made, both by companies looking at fathers as
consumers and by daddy bloggers looking to ride a wave of brand sponsorship
just as mommy bloggers have.
THE 200 or so bloggers and
media professionals who attended the second annual Dad 2.0
conference in Houston from Jan. 31 to Feb. 2 were mainly in their
30s and 40s. They tended to wear well-fitting jeans, button-down shirts and
blazers, and they were quick to whip out pictures of their children on their iPhones.
The 44 brand representatives at
the conference tried to project a hip blend of parenthood and masculinity. At
one point, Dove Men+Care, a Unilever line of
deodorants, soap, shampoo and other products, set up a traditional barbershop
at the Four Seasons Hotel, where the conference was held. The same space became
a whiskey bar one night, complete with bracing free samples. Dove, which paid
six figures to serve as the conference’s main sponsor, also offered daily
sword-fighting lessons with Steven McMichael, who trained the actors in “The
Hobbit.”
Another sponsor was Honda,
which offered test-drives of some of its 2013 models, including, of course, a
minivan. Kraft was there, with taste tests of cheese-laden meals. ConAgra
Foods, which makes things as diverse as Swiss Miss and Hebrew National hot
dogs, played to more traditional notions of what men enjoy by featuring
cheerleaders in short skirts at its booth. On the other hand, it also sponsored
an event called the Great Dad Cook-Off.
Representatives of Maclaren,
the stroller maker, did not have a booth, but they came to the conference this
year to do reconnaissance. “Maclaren is eyeing the dad market,” says Shanin
Molinaro, the company’s global vice president for marketing. The company, she
says, has taken note of evolving parental roles, including a rising number of
stay-at-home fathers and fathers in same-sex
marriages. Just this year, Maclaren came out with a new stroller,
the BMW Buggy.
Dad 2.0 is owned by XY Media, a
start-up company based in Houston that advises brands on how to appeal to
fathers. The conference’s founders are Doug French, 47, who has two sons, 10
and 7; and John Pacini, 40, who has a son, 11, and a daughter, 7. They saw an
opening in the market after they packed sessions on fatherhood-related topics
at the Mom 2.0 Summit in New Orleans in 2011. That conference was founded,
conveniently, by Mr. Pacini’s wife, Carrie Pacini.
One of the biggest laments
among bloggers at this year’s Dad 2.0 Summit was that many marketers continued
to portray fathers as babbling buffoons who need constant supervision. “Dads
are seen as heroes as long as their kids don’t drown in the swimming pool,”
says Mr. French, who has a blog called Laid-Off Dad.
Last year, the daddy
blogosphere erupted when Huggies released a commercial that showed a
group of fathers and their babies, with a voice-over that said, “To prove
Huggies diapers and wipes can handle anything, we put them to the toughest test
imaginable: Dads, alone with their babies, in one house, for five days.”
The daddy bloggers were led by Chris Routly, 37, a stay-at-home
father in Portland, Ore., who blogs at The Daddy Doctrines. He started a petition calling on Huggies, which is
owned by the Kimberly-Clark
Corporation, to pull the ad.
“The verbiage was implying that
dads need the help of a special product to overcome our incompetence,” says Mr.
Routly, whose sons are 4 and 2.
The petition on Change.org drew
1,300 signatures, but Mr. Routly closed it after a Huggies representative called him
to solicit advice about making the company’s marketing more acceptable to
fathers.
Huggies replaced the commercial
with a spot that had already
been shot, with a different voice-over: “To prove Huggies diapers can handle
anything, we asked real dads to put them to the test — with their own babies,
at naptime, after a very full feeding.” The subtle difference in wording
implied that fathers were discerning diaper experts, rather than neglectful
idiots.
Kevin Brown, who oversees
commercial programming for the Huggies brand in Neenah, Wis., attended the Dad
2.0 Summit and said his company learned something. “Dads do not want to be
treated differently, and they do not want to be treated foolishly,” he said.
“We are better marketers because of what happened last year.”
MORE marketers are paying
attention to fathers because more fathers are deciding what to buy for their
families. That comes as no surprise to Mr. Routly. “Before I left for Dad 2.0,
I had to make sure my wife knew the way to the grocery store,” he says.
To capture that growing market,
brands face a challenge: How do they appeal to fathers’ competence without
making them look like mothers?
Some daddy bloggers grumbled
over a 2011 ad for Procter &
Gamble’s Tide detergent that showed a stay-at-home father folding
laundry and referred to him as a “dad-mom.” The National At-Home Dad Network, a nonprofit
group that had a booth at the summit, puts it this way in its literature: “Dads
do not parent like Mom, nor are a replacement for her when she’s not home.”
Matthew Willcox, executive
director of the Institute of Decision Making at the advertising agency Draftfcb
in San Francisco, studies how neuroscience and behavioral economics relate to
marketing. He suggests that companies and advertisers need to be very aware of the
societal shift around parenting. “It’s not a question of applying the same
rules that apply to moms,” he says.
Mr. Willcox, who did not attend
Dad 2.0, cited a 2010 Toyota ad by
Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles for the Sienna SE minivan as one that was
particularly effective at reaching the new father demographic. The
two-and-a-half-minute online spot featured a normal-looking couple rapping
about parenting while nuzzling their Sienna SE, styled the “Swagger Wagon.” The video, which briefly
appeared on television, has attracted more than 11 million views on YouTube
since May 2010.
“The whole notion of having a
minivan can be quite degrading — you talk to parents about having to swap out
their car for a very practical minivan, and it can be devastating,” says Mr.
Willcox, whose company did not work on the campaign. “But what Toyota and the
Swagger Wagon did was make having a minivan part of a positive identity for
fathers.”
In the Swagger Wagon ad, the
father (played by Brian Huskey) is balding but wears thick, black, hipster-type
glasses. “The dad in the video is not a cringingly cool dad,” Mr. Willcox says,
but “appropriately cool.”
THE relationship between the
bloggers and marketers cuts both ways. The marketers are selling to the
bloggers, but the bloggers also have something to gain from the marketers, like
sponsorships and branding.
Charlie Capen, 31, who blogs at
How to Be a
Dad, asked Honda, a sponsor of Dad 2.0, to back a project with his
blog’s co-founder, Andy Herald, and David Vienna of the site The Daddy Complex.
He thought it would be fun to chronicle the men’s 32-hour drive from Los
Angeles to the conference in Houston. Honda provided the vehicle, a 2013
Crosstour, and covered video production costs. It will also pay for space to
show the video on Mr. Capen’s blog, and for him to promote the video on social
media sites, something known as sponsored content.
“The idea is us in the car
having a frank and funny conversation about ourselves as fathers,” says Mr.
Capen, who is also the director of online engagement at 20th Century Fox. “They
are sponsoring us to talk about fatherhood in a way that is funny and
consumable.” Neither he nor Honda disclosed further financial details, such as
how much the bloggers were paid for the video, which has not yet been posted.
Mr. Capen, who has a 3-year-old
son, says his site receives 200,000 to 300,000 unique viewers a month. He has
worked with Clorox and the automaker Kia on similar projects. The collaboration
with Clorox resulted in a post last December titled “The 3 P’s of
Parenting,” referring, the site noted, to “pee, poop and puke.” Clorox tried to
entice readers to click through and win $15,000 by sharing their messy moment
in a 120-character story.
As mommy bloggers and their
readers can attest, sponsorships carry risks. The Federal Trade Commission can
fine the blogger and the sponsoring company for not revealing the relationship.
And bloggers perceived as simply shilling for companies without regard for
quality will lose respect.
But for fathers, just getting
the attention of consumer-products companies has been a long time coming.
IT has been a struggle to get
fathers included in family-oriented ads at all. Just look at the campaign that
Procter & Gamble ran last year during the Summer Olympics, called “Thank
You, Mom,” which saluted mothers for helping to nurture Olympic athletes.
Surely some fathers were involved, daddy bloggers argued.
Advertisers and brands have
been slow to respond to fathers as a consumer group because of a dearth of
data, says Alan Kercinik, a Chicago-based group creative director at Edelman,
the public relations firm.
“There is considerably more
time, attention and money spent understanding how ‘she’ buys versus how
‘families’ buy — and certainly more than ‘he’ buys,” Mr. Kercinik says.
“We are just at the hello stage on this journey
to reach dads,” says Barry Calpino, vice president for breakthrough innovation
at the Kraft Foods Group. “Ninety-nine percent of the conversation is
‘she,’ ” he says. “I haven’t been to a food retailer who didn’t refer to
the shopper as ‘she,’ so I don’t think we are even thinking about metrics at
this point.”
That is changing, albeit
slowly. Recently, Dove Men+Care commissioned research, in conjunction with the Center for Work
and Family at Boston College, about the roles fathers play at work,
at home and in their leisure time.
“Any subject related to dads,
we want to know about,” says Rob Candelino, vice president for marketing at
Unilever, who focuses on the Dove Men +Care product line.
This is not a social mission;
it is about the bottom line. Dove Men+Care, introduced in 2010, is already a
$100 million brand, and about 75 percent of its customers are fathers,
according to Mr. Candelino, who is a father himself. “Men are more receptive to
messages about taking care of themselves after they have children,” he says.
In the past, advertisers paid
more attention to men in the so-called laddie demographic, ages 18 to 30, who
are more likely to spend their disposable income on alcohol and cars. But there
is a whole group of men between the beer-guzzling, Maxim-reading phase and the
Viagra years.
Mr. Candelino described his
target customer as a father, or an expectant one, who is in his late 30s and
married, cares deeply about his role as a father and mentor, and is as
comfortable having a tea party with his daughter as he is having beers with his
friends.
“No brands were talking to guys
at that level,” he says. “Society is ready for a new narrative about dads.”
Terwyl ek so bietjie lees oor die beweging, kom ek op die volgende blog-inskrywing af. Dit is boeiende leesstof - oor hoe soldate, rof en grof, dink ons, hul man-wees wil uitleef.
