• by Mike Bloxham , Op-Ed Contributor, May 9, 2013

In the last week or so, there have been many references in the press to consumers feeling “Loving” as a result of coverage of Johnson & Johnson’s new corporate ad campaign, which focuses on family moments of tenderness and togetherness to carry their message home.

Time will tell just how successful the campaign is but in the meantime, this USA TouchPoints analysis looks at the percentage of Moms 18-64 who claim to be in a Loving emotional state on any given weekday or weekend.  It also examines how this varies according to who Moms are with.

The data in this analysis are based on the emotions that respondents report themselves having experienced in the previous 30 minutes over a 10-day period selecting from seventeen different emotions available to them – one of which is Loving.  As you would expect, we often see several emotions in one 30-minute period

What is very clear is that on the whole, weekends outstrip weekdays for Moms to feel Loving by. Both in total (by 5%) and in most social settings (the exceptions being when alone or with parents). This is likely due to the amount of time when family members are together as opposed to the weekdays when work and school lessens time spent together.  Perhaps unsurprisingly then, a brand seeking to loving family moments might do well to upweight spend on Saturday and Sunday.

Who Moms are with makes a real difference to the extent to which they are in a Loving frame of mind.  Time spent with her Partner or Spouse and with her Children are all but equal on weekdays in terms of emotional reach for Loving recording around 16% reach for both social settings.  It is only at the weekend when there is any difference at all between the two with Partner / Spouse increasing to just over 20% emotional reach and Children moving up to just over 18%.

From here, there is a significant drop in emotional reach to other social settings. Time with extended family, such as Parents, Brothers/Sisters, do not elicit Loving feelings nearly as much as do Partners/Spouses and Children.
Interestingly, Moms report feeling Loving more often while in the company of their Pets than they do their Parents or their Siblings on either weekdays or the weekend. 

What that says about our society is unclear, but if nothing else it suggests that perhaps there’s potential for brands in other sectors to take a similar approach to J&J.

Obvious extensions to this analysis are to look at the emotional reach of Loving by time of day and social setting in order to understand the daily emotional journey. That helps determine when the best times might be to reach the target in the right frame of mind.

Similarly, it would be possible to identify the right media mix from the same starting point. It would also be interesting to refine the sample to compare working Moms to non-working Moms, Moms of very young children to teenagers, etc.