The power of the PANK

For my inaugural blog post, I would like to talk about PANKs.  If you are unfamiliar with this term, then I am thrilled to be the one to introduce it to you. “PANK” is an acronym that means “Professional Aunt, No Kids”.  I think “PANK” is worthy of attention for a few reasons, not least of which is how absurd and hilarious it sounds.

Indeed, the sheer slapstick joy of its sound is the first thing that struck me about the term PANK.  I was introduced to the term a couple days ago while watching a livestream of Timescast on nytimes.com, which featured a segment on the lucrative potential of tapping into the hitherto unplumbed PANK demographic.  Apparently, It is estimated that PANK spending accounts for over 9 billion dollars per year in the United States.  The Timescast segment is full of sentences that sound deliciously absurd—a few highlights:

“What we have learned is that there are 23 million PANKs out there—one in every five women”

“Laura Mignott knows all too well what it’s like to be a PANK”

“The value of marketing to PANKs has already been uncovered by some retailers and store owners”

“PANKs are doing a lot more than splurging on the occasional fancy dress”

Sentences like these are funny enough to warrant a discussion of PANKs, but the absurdity doesn’t end at the grins elicited by the term’s purely phonetic delights.  The story behind the PANK movement is almost as entertaining as the moniker it has christened for itself. 

The term “PANK” was created a few years ago by Melanie Notkin, who is also the brains behind savvyauntie.com.  Melanie is both an aunt and a marketer.  As explained in The Power of the PANK, a special report authored by Notkin and a marketing research firm, Notkin was inspired by how unprepared she felt when she became an aunt: “When Melanie first became an aunt in 2001, she found herself concerned by the lack of resources for women like her, and she also saw market opportunity.” 

Notkin created SavvyAuntie because she wanted single women to have the power to fulfil their desires, specifically those desires related to giving gifts to other people’s children.  Making PANKs more visible to advertisers was a primary motivation in creating Saavy Auntie—thanks to the Savvy Auntie, “now advertisers are able to find her and reach her”.  This may sound a bit insidious, but Notkin’s branding seems to be a labour of love to PANKs, rather than a desire to exploit them on behalf of the makers of cashmere bonnets or video games.  I have never met Notkin, but the short interview clips I’ve seen give me no reason not to think that her love of PANKs is genuine, as are her ambitions to provide the “help” she thinks they need.

The New York Times calls Savvy Auntie a “lifestyle brand”.  What I find interesting is that such branding is aimed at marketers, rather than at consumers.  I admit that I am largely uneducated in the world of marketing, but this approach seems to be an inversion of the way I’ve always understood branding to work.  Instead of a company like Apple or Jagermeister convincing folks that there is a lifestyle waiting for them if only they use its products, we have a group of consumers banding together to plead to companies and marketers to recognize them as a significant, legitimate, and affluent demographic.

Notkin’s special report, The Power of the PANK, is full of sentences that are as interesting as they are hilarious, with golden quotes like: “Move over soccer moms. There’s a new group of smart, powerful women spenders out there.  PANKs have time, income and a passion for purchasing for the kids in their lives”.

But, of course, the report isn’t just noteworthy because of the inherent silliness of the term PANK; it’s also an interesting example of the intimate ways that marketing and identity are linked together.  As the introduction to the report explains, advertisers are looking to create new ways to help women assert themselves as women, and the PANK brand is an attempt to do that:

“Moms remain critical to their strategies, but they are looking for other ways of defining women that may not be motherhood-based. The focus of our research was to identify new segments of women, regardless of their mom status, to help determine how marketers and communicators can reach them, and to build an engagement profile to maximize their potential.”   

There is much discussion these days about the way that our personal information is mined and stored to facilitate advertisement.  So far, most of the discussions I’ve heard about companies collecting personal information about potential customers has been replete with concerns about privacy, Orwellian surveillance, propaganda, Skynet, and a bunch of other scary-sounding stuff.  In the case of Savvy Auntie, these concerns are not only unimportant, but the very notion of a PANK strives to embrace all the things that keep paranoid privacy advocates awake at night; PANKs want to make it as easy as possible for advertisers to know about them and how they can best be marketed to, all while having their identities and senses of self worth directly contingent upon the way they relate to these advertisers.

Absurd though all this may seem, Notkin might be on the right track. If she is fighting for society to recognize a woman’s importance in a child’s life, regardless of their “mom status”, then her methods might just be effective. If marketers bank on PANKs and celebrations of this lifestyle enter popular culture, then PANKs might be able to feel as though they are fulfilling their roles as women, regardless of any insufficiencies regarding their “mom status”.  Repugnant though many will find this idea to be, Notkin’s efforts could very well have the desired effect.

Now that the internet enables projects like Savvy Auntie, which make it easy for a group to stand up and prove its viability as a market, we now have an unprecedented opportunity to influence popular culture by proving that previously ignored segments of the population are worthy of mainstream attention (so long as these segments have disposable income, of course).  It’s kind of like petitioning a rock band to visit your town or a Hollywood studio to make a sequel to a cult classic, though here we’re talking about proving the commercial viability of an entire lifestyle and means of self-recognition.

If Notkin is right, and this bottom-up style of lifestyle branding is indicative of things to come, then we can rest assured that the future will be full of PANKs.  In a sense, we might all be PANKs someday, and that prospect is almost as fascinating as it is hilarious.


References/further reading:

The Power of the PANK
http://pankpower.com/images/Power-of-the-PANK-Report2.pdf

Savvy Auntie
http://savvyauntie.com/defaulthome.aspx

Timescast, December 3, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/video/2012/12/03/business/100000001936259/newspapers-continue-to-struggle.html