Mother Knows Best: Understanding Mom Blogs' Influence on Moms' Nutrition Beliefs and Habits

Abstract

Mom bloggers, and more broadly, mom influencers seem to be leaving their mark on parenting trends, but at this point, there is little formal evidence testing their influence. In this study we use manual and automated content analysis on 22 prominent mom bloggers to better understand what they are saying about food and nutrition, then we test several hypotheses about why mom bloggers may be persuasive. We found that mom bloggers built trust by creating an online community, commiserating about the difficulties of mothering with their readers, and by providing useful content, especially kid-friendly recipes. We found mixed results when testing the capacity for opinion leadership directly, but we found some evidence that mom bloggers were more influential than experts on moms’ food purchasing decisions and that relational style writing, often used by bloggers, can also be impactful.