Amalia Goldvaser, due in September, walked right by the plant-resin teething rings and told me that she was “very skeptical” of the benefits offered by many of the natural products on display. She then laughed, because despite her skepticism, she was indeed spending a Sunday looking at all those natural products. Nearby, Jackie Pepe, mother of a 3-month-old named Matilda, was looking for a cheap natural cleaner for cloth diapers. For her, going natural is what economists call a weak revealed preference. She will embrace it as long as it doesn’t cost a lot more.

Much of the baby market is devoted to figuring out which preferences people will pay more for. And it seems as if the market now offers endless choices. At my last count, Amazon alone sold 2,417 different pacifiers, more than 1,000 car seats and 3,085 bath toys. But most of those products are essentially identical, made from the same inexpensive raw materials — metal, plastic, foam, wood — and manipulated into similar shapes and tested in exactly the same way. Stringent governmental regulation ensures that concerned parents could buy the cheapest car seat, stroller, crib or pacifier in a discount store and be confident that their children would be as safe as if they were in a $270 Cybex Aton car seat or a $4,495 Roddler custom stroller.

The baby market is essentially a commodity market. And because it is extremely difficult to make money in a highly competitive commodity market, manufacturers look for ways to justify higher profit margins. There isn’t much profit in corn, but a company that produces a popular organic blue-corn tortilla chip can make serious money. In the baby business, the challenge is persuading parents that a product has a unique feature worthy of a price premium. A glance at the shelves indicates just how narrowly baby-product companies have divided parents into subgroups. Some will pay extra for conveniences like a light, easy-to-fold stroller; others want aesthetic luxuries, like leather trim. Many respond to fear. (Is my child safer in Baby Trend’s Inertia car seat for $179.99 or with Safety 1st’s Air Protect+ system, which costs $189.99? Or should I just buy a cheap one for $50?) Others are willing to spend an extra $250 or so for an organic-cotton car-seat cover to minimize baby’s contact with artificial fabric.

Emily Oster, an economist at the University of Chicago and the mother of Penelope, 2, told me that the baby business is “a classic example of a perfectly competitive industry.” Nearly every product we buy — from coffee and cereal to hotel rooms and cars — is a commodity dressed up in premium packaging, Oster pointed out. But with baby products, the process is intensified. Kellogg’s, Ford and Starbucks can spend years tempting a consumer, but baby companies have a short window — often just the few weeks before a due date — to capture expecting parents’ attention. These campaigns often try to simultaneously scare and reassure. One dominant marketing strategy is to list all the features a product has (and, by implication, the competitors don’t) that will guarantee a healthy and happy a child. My favorite is the ubiquitous announcement that a product is phthalate-free because 1.) most people don’t know what phthalates are; and 2.) U.S. law prohibits the use of phthalates — a plastic softener associated with birth defects in rats — in all products for children. (That said, I was reassured that my son’s sippy cup has no phthalates whatsoever.)

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/magazine/the-sippy-cup-1.html?partner=rss&emc=rss