How Marketing Helps or Harms Consumers After Baby Loss

More than one in four women has suffered the loss of a child due to miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant death (i.e., what we refer to collectively as “baby loss”). Marketers routinely incorporate child-related messages in advertising tactics, such as asking questions about the number of children someone has on company forms, asking parents to share a picture of their children, posting advertisements depicting happy people in pregnancy, etc. These actions can retrigger feelings of grief and devastation for the women and their close family and friends who have lost a child during pregnancy (perinatal loss), infancy, or early childhood. Our research seeks to identify the ways that marketing actions bring harm and reduce well-being to people who have suffered such baby loss as well as identify tactics that can be used to decrease grief and even help facilitate healing and well-being. To the best of our knowledge, there is no marketing academic research that examines the effects of such loss on response to marketing tactics. Furthermore, this research area is ripe with opportunity for marketers to help facilitate healing and well-being. To provide insight in these areas, qualitative interviews will be conducted with bereaved moms that have suffered baby loss. We will then follow up with quantitative studies to extend generalizability of marketing and public policy suggestions to a larger audience.