CHEP Network

Client: Karicare
Product: Baby Formula and Toddler Milk Drinks
Title: (Un)Geddes
Media: Social, Online Film, Digital, OOH and Website
Country: Australia
Date Of Campaign: 29 June 2022

Background: Karicare, a baby formula brand, is on a mission to redefine how society portrays parenting. Today everywhere parents turn they see an inaccurate portrayal of what parenting should be like. Specifically, that it should look and feel perfect. In fact, 96% of Australian parents feel like they’re under pressure to be perfect, and 61% feel bad when they see ‘perfect’ images. This pressure to be perfect is more than just an unhealthy influence, it has serious and broad reaching impacts – a study in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychology showed its link to higher parental burnout due to stress, worse spousal relationship, and lower work-life balance and career ambitions. We were challenged to develop a PR led idea to achieve two key objectives – first, to redefine how parents view ‘perfect’ parenting moments, and secondly to turn around a year-long flatline in market share growth.

Idea: Our idea was to close the gap between the ‘real’ moments parents experience in their daily lives and the perfect ones presented everywhere else. To do this we would show parents the ‘real’ that is normally hidden behind the curated and staged images they get to see. To do this we would go to the pioneer of picture-perfect infant photography, who the New York Times called the “original baby influencer” – Anne Geddes. We would challenge her to break her style of elaborately-staged baby photos to show the ‘real’ moments behind the perfection she is famous for. Rather than perfect children, each photo featured a crying, distracted or destructive child… refreshingly familiar for any parent. By showing the real moments behind the most famous perfect images we made a clear statement – the perfect images of children you see is not real life. Our strategic aim was to show parents that real can be perfect too. We wanted parents to embrace their imperfect parenting experiences and be more comfortable in sharing their own real experiences. We would do this in three parts – first, we wanted to show parents that the ‘perfect’ portrayal of parenting they see every day is an illusion. We would show them that behind the ‘perfect’ they see are ‘real’ moments just like those they experience. Secondly, we wanted to give parents (and influencers), that would never share any photos that were less than perfect, to have the confidence to #FeedTheReal. To rebalance the disparity between perfect and real on social feeds around Australia. Finally, to spark a wider conversation in mass media we conducted bespoke research to quantify. Using our research and our original baby influencer – Anne Geddes, we created a powerful story to capture the attention of media.

Results: (un)Geddes hit a cultural nerve in a traditional category, it substantially increased Karicare's brand saliency, improved brand perceptions and stole market share, reaching record sales volumes and record market share – all with less spend than the year prior. -Achieved over 52 million in reach with over 60 pieces of media coverage. -Influencers not part of the campaign and thousands of parents sharing their own ‘real’ parenting moments. -We increase brand saliency by 23 points and our brand health rating as measure by Kantar jumped by 38.6% – catapulting us from 5th to 4th in the category. -88.4% of parents who viewed the campaign reacted positively to it. -We achieved a record value share of 7.2%. -We set a new sales record during the campaign period, increasing by 5% from the month prior. -We finished the year as the only established brand to gain value share in 2022. All this while spending significantly less on media than the period before our campaign launch.