To market its Huggies Pull-Ups training pants for toddlers, the Kimberly-Clark Corporation has opted for an advertising campaign that focuses on celebrating that first flush with fanfare in the hope of making the potty training process more enjoyable for parents and their children.
“Moms don’t look forward to potty training,” said Pete Sawin, the brand director for Pull-Ups at Kimberly-Clark. “Many of them procrastinate and put it off. They start training well after their kids are ready to.”
Parents, Mr. Sawin said, are “seeking more milestone moments to celebrate.” The goal of the campaign, he said, is to make the training process “easy and fun” while introducing children to the ritual that is using the toilet.
Kimberly-Clark worked with a number of agencies, including Organic for digital ads and a mobile application, Ogilvy Mather for print and television ads and LatinWorks for a Spanish-language portion of the campaign.
For a television ad for English-speaking mothers, Ogilvy cast a family with a child who was about to go through toilet training, not actors, said Dave Metcalf, group creative director at Ogilvy. The ad, which was shot in Vancouver, features a toddler who flushes the toilet at his parents’ encouragement and then hears a commotion outside the house.
The family opens the front door and sees a parade celebrating the child’s first flush, replete with floats, acrobats and a marching band. The family was not told about the parade, Mr. Metcalf said, so their reactions of surprise were genuine. For production reasons, however, the home where the ad was shot was not the family’s real home. A second video showing the making of the commercial, including snippets from the casting call for the performers and the family, will be posted online.
To further engage children and their parents in toilet training, a mobile application called the Pull-Ups Big Kid App includes a timer for parents to remind their children when to use the toilet, articles and tips about training, videos, celebratory songs, calls from Disney characters like Rapunzel and Mickey Mouse and a reward system that gives a child a star for every attempt at using the toilet. Once a child has gotten a certain number of stars, the app offers 3-D games that can be played on a tablet or mobile phone.
Ian Bell, head of home care research at Euromonitor, a market research company, said campaigns like this one were meant to make the process of toilet training “more accessible and less threatening” for parents who may be overwhelmed by information guides on the topic and by cultural pressures about how and when to begin the process. “Some parents would frown if it takes to the age of 3 or above,” Mr. Bell said. “Others think you shouldn’t push it on a child.”
Cultural nuance is part of the Spanish-language portion of the campaign, said Victor Paredes, vice president at LatinWorks, the agency that worked on that portion. “If one in four kids is Hispanic, that’s not a business opportunity, that’s a business imperative,” he said of the recent growth in the number of Latino children in the United States.
The agency found that in non-Hispanic households, parents were struggling to start the process of toilet training, but that in Hispanic households, the issues were different.
“In the Latina’s world, the pressure came with sticking to the process,” Mr. Paredes said. “They had some preconceived notions of the process needing to be fast and the gold standard was transitioning to regular underwear, and not understanding the transition that happens.”
Hispanic mothers are likely to be younger and to have larger families than non-Hispanic mothers, he said. More of them are entering the work force and becoming heads of households as well, he said, limiting the time many of them can dedicate to toilet training their children.
While the ads for Hispanic and non-Hispanic mothers will be similar, the ads for Hispanic mothers will focus on “every flush” rather than on the “first flush.”
Television ads in English began running Jan. 1 on networks like Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. Digital ads in English will run on Web sites like Facebook and BabyCenter.com, and print ads will run in parenting magazines. Spanish-language ads will begin in February and will run on Univision’s broadcast network, on Web sites like Mamás Latinas and Batanga and in print publications like Siempre Mujer and Vanidades.
According to Mr. Bell of Euromonitor, sales of toilet training pants in the United States, including Huggies Pull-Ups and other brands, have struggled since the recession. From 2008 to 2012, sales for all manufacturers making training pants fell $150 million, with some parents opting to save money by using cheaper diapers, he said.
Kimberly-Clark said it would spend 43 percent of the advertising budget for its Pull-Ups product on the campaign, but declined to specify what the budget for 2013 would be. Data from Kantar Media, a unit of WPP, show that the company spent $13.5 million advertising Pull-Ups in 2010 and $17 million in 2011. From January to September 2012, it spent $22.1 million advertising Pull-Ups.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/business/huggies-pull-ups-ad-campaign-aims-to-celebrate-toilet-training.html?partner=rss&emc=rss