Byline: Karen Krebsbach
Move over, soccer moms. There’s a new demographic on the block and she’s formidable: the Ivy League mom, a group of 9.7 million households with investable assets of $6.5 trillion. What does she want from a bank? Everything-and she has no patience for screwups.
The highly educated woman who briefly leaves the workforce to raise children, the Ivy League mom is no June Cleaver or Carol Brady: She is affluent, loyal and shares financial and investment decisions with her high-net-worth spouse. That makes her a prime candidate for myriad financial products and services and a perfect cross-selling target. Most still maintain a separate checking account from their spouse’s.
But she’s also a demanding consumer, focused on service, rates and simplicity, says Katerina O. Walsh, research director with Boston-based Aite Group and author of a report on the group. “There’s no room for error with a customer like the Ivy League Mom,” she says. “‘She isn’t fickle, as immature younger consumers often are. And she won’t switch for minor competitive reasons, like marginally lower rates. As a rule, Ivy League Moms don’t like to shop around for financial products. …Despite her hunger for convenience and the notorious hassle of switching, an Ivy League Mom won’t hesitate to leave a firm that doesn’t meet her expectations.”
Her numbers are only growing. In 2001, 59 percent of master’s degrees and half of all professional degrees (47 percent of law degrees, 43 percent of medical degrees and 39 percent of dentistry degrees) were granted to women, compared to 40 percent in 1970. The report didn’t specify what percentage of these graduates attended Ivy League schools.
But the long-standing conflict between stay-at-home moms and moms who work outside the home continues to rage-for both society and the mothers themselves. Indeed, Walsh sees little progress in the U.S. toward “family-friendly work options, such as flexible hours, job sharing, contractor positions or part-time work options,” all of which she calls “automatic career crashers.”
Walsh urges banks to take a page from the book of successful retailers: provide reliable service; offer online administration; have a convenient physical location; and embrace simplicity. “Banks don ‘t even know this demographic exists,” she says. “They’re missing an entire consumer segment.”
The biggest mistake bank marketers make in reaching out to this segment is expecting them to respond to the same messages they send other HNW investors, who is typically a 60-year-old white male of the Republic persuasion focused on his career and retirement. Instead, the Ivy League Mom is motivated by both family and career, is charitable, is frugal, is devoted to her local community, possesses a wide swath of political leanings and religious affiliations, and harbors a myriad of different values.
One way for banks’ message to penetrate the world of the Ivy League Mom is to “appeal to her sense of conflict between family and career,” says Walsh. “The family message won’t resonate with them. They are giving their family everything. They feel torn. A message that focuses on family has the risk of alienating them. One that focuses on career will also miss the market for them, because they’ve closed that page for now. Temporarily.”
She notes that conflict can be a “positive message, a distinguishing one. It doesn’t have to be negative. You can say, ‘You may feel torn now, but there are days when you know you’re doing the right thing.’ These women feel very isolated and different from others. They can’t connect with other stay-at-home moms or their former colleagues.”
Evidence of this conflict is only indicative of this group’s empowerment. “One of the reasons they feel the conflict is that they made that choice themselves,” she muses. “Why did they? Because they have a choice. These women are blessed to have that choice-and a choice they made themselves.”
Walsh couldn’t name one bank doing a good job of advertising to this subset, but suggests that vignettes of an entrepreneurial lifestyle of women struggling to balance work and family obligations would be sure winners. “A combination of marketing messages would appeal to them,” she says. “There are a combination of needs, but a lot of them want what all consumers want.”
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