Stay at home fathers and mothers from a marketing perspective. SOLUTIONS FOR STAY AT HOME FATHERS AND MOTHERS Introduction Economic experts believe that increases in the numbers of stay at home fathers and mothers available are as a result of the changing global economic climate (Young, 2008). Among other factors like unavailability of jobs, employee lay offs, unemployment, and general economic hardship, not as many energetic men and women are getting jobs to do as much as they could. For this end, most of them end up compromising to stay at home whiles the other partner who may be gainfully employed continue in the labor front as the bread winner of the family. But because most people become stay at home mums and dads not out of their will but as victims of circumstances, they tend to become highly depressed and lonely with this new trend of role. It is not surprising therefore that latest reports show high rates of cases of heart diseases (Watkins and Mohr, 2001). But as long as the cause of most cases of stay at home fathers and mothers is as a result of economic factors, marketing philosophies, which are directly related to economics could be used to salvage the problem. Two of these are discussed below.

Support network

Support network is an important marketing perspective that can be used to address one of the issues commonly faced by stay at home fathers and mothers, which is the problem of dilemma between traditional and untraditional gender stereotypes. Especially for stay at home fathers who function in backgrounds where much premium is placed on traditional roles of husbands and wives, they often become confused as to roles they have to take up and those they have to abandon as they stay at home. But should these people use the marketing strategy of support network, which deals with the setting up of connections and networks with people who are involved in similar trades, they would be presented with the opportunity of learning from one another, how they cope with their individual dilemmas and the eventual decisions they take to come out of these dilemmas. Then also, the support network can help them in learning new strategies of generally overcoming their weaknesses and threats and turning these into strengths and opportunities, just as it happens in SWOT analysis (Wheatley, 2007).

Packaging

Another marketing perspective from which these confused and isolated stay at home mothers and stay at home fathers can have solutions to their problem has to do with packaging. In marketing, packaging is often used to describe the medium through which the product is conveyed to the consumer (Flick, 2008). In the present circumstance, packaging can be used the issue of stay at home fathers and mothers having few places to play the roles of their own tribe. This is said because most of these people do not realize sufficient places to play the role of their own tribes because the people within the said settings refuse to embrace them and the roles they play (Bakker, and Leiter, 2009). The people do not embrace them because in some cases, they mistake them for lazy mothers and fathers. But should these stay at home mothers and fathers package themselves and their roles in a very attractive appearance, people who have such mentalities would change their minds on them (Ghauri and Gronhaug, 2006).

Conclusion

The discussions so far have brought to light that it should not be a curse for a person to be a stay at home father or mother, especially when due to economic reasons the person has no other choice. But as these people will continue to battle against some unfortunate misconceptions of society, it will be very ideal for them to use modernized marketing perspectives and paradigms to overcome their loneliness, dilemma and isolation. It is important that they continue to communicate among themselves to identify best practices in the tasks they undertake. It would also be important that they present themselves to society in a well packaged way so that they will not be seen as lazy people who resort to staying at home as a way of running away from economic responsibilities.

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