From pre-conception (including fertility) to birth, smart brands are creating inspiring educative stores and services to ease parents into their new life chapter. Spanning ultra-practical product testing (buggies, car seats) and health (“intimate” education, mental wellness), the best placate anxiety. Look also to specialist support, such as midwife expertise, to boost brand credibility.

Other brands are tapping into rising discourse around ‘matrescence’ (an adolescence-like period of change during new motherhood) and care gaps left by national governments. Key strategies include ‘relational wellness’ workshops (focused on the importance of nurturing positive and meaningful relationships with others), specialised in-store beauty services for new mothers, and post-natal medi-grocery concierge.

 Smart brands are amplifying the positives (and mitigating the negatives) of life with young children via STEM-centric, joy-maximising brand spaces boosting playtime; AI services helping parents return to work by translating parenting skills to the workplace; and (in the case of one financial brand) assuaging parents’ financial worries via sanctuary-esque in-mall brand spaces.

Other brands are allaying parental anxieties regarding teens and tweens by creating educative apps, zines and microsites catering to both teens/tweens and their parents on hot button issues from sex ed and social media to problematic beauty standards. Contemporary language and framing distinguish these from the dry, public service announcement style of conventional teen advice sites.

Globally, parents are actively parenting for longer: in the US, grown children are turning to their parents for advice more than previous generations, while young Europeans are continuing to live at home (see Key Stats). Astute brands are responding with ad campaigns tracking parental journeys from cradle to college and beyond, showing solidarity with parents of boomeranging Gen Zers and millennials.