CASE STUDY
To make Huggies more meaningful to parents, Accenture introduced a new global creative platform and brought it to life across the customer journey.
5-minute read
September 30, 2021
For half a century, Huggies has been a category leader and babycare icon, familiar in cultures around the world. But, somewhere along the way, it had become less meaningful to modern parents, making it vulnerable to global rivals and new startups. To make Huggies more meaningful to parents across the globe, and adapt to their increasingly digital behaviors, we needed to reimagine its total brand experience. So we introduced a new global creative platform, “We Got You, Baby,” and brought it to life across every region and every step of the customer journey.
We needed to define a brand purpose that could unify how Huggies shows up around the world for a new generation of parents. Shifting family dynamics, a flood of conflicting advice from the Internet and social media, and a category full of overly perfect babyhood tropes leave today’s parents questioning their instincts.
With decades of experience and innovation, Huggies could help parents feel more secure across their journey and offer babies the comfort they need as they navigate their new world. This gave life to a new global brand purpose, “Helping Navigate the Unknowns of Babyhood.”
From the moment parents give birth, the whole world is a giant unknown. But the same is true for their babies. Both need a little reassurance to feel secure as they grow.
Our platform, “We Got You, Baby,” shows how Huggies helps babies – and their parents – navigate a baby’s world, and how its products make babies more comfortable in it.
We harnessed the creative power of Accenture, led by our Droga5 team, to bring this platform to life globally, tailoring to the needs of each market.
The Huggies rebrand honors the past, while looking to a digital-first future.
We modernized the identity system, which launched globally with our new creative platform to create a cohesive visual language that takes on the characteristics of wise, approachable, and playfully irreverent.
We thus transformed an outdated brand aesthetic into a globally-minded system that was not only relevant again, but groundbreaking, and which set a new tone and level of design achievement for the entire category.
To bring this platform to life, we created a global toolkit of strategic resources to inform local market platform adaptation:
A statement encapsulating our global mission and values as a brand.
A portfolio architecture that streamlines global marketing initiatives and ties them back to our purpose.
An exercise that architects and prioritizes campaigns to achieve long and short term goals.
A framework on how the brand should behave across paid, owned and earned channels based on objectives, brand purpose, campaign orchestration and creative inputs.
A framework that ensures the work delivers against designated objectives and assesses impact across the holistic media ecosystem—paid, owned and earned.
A massive rebrand of this kind deserved the attention of a massive audience. With that in mind, we created Huggies’ first-ever commercial to run in America’s favorite “Big Game” (the event none of us can legally call out, even on a company website, but you know what we mean, right?)
The spot, “Welcome to the World, Baby,” featured another first – babies born literally that day. Working with Huggies’ network of partner hospitals, we gathered user-generated content (UGC) footage of newborns from across the country that we inserted into the film just hours before going on air.
The film was supported by a second-screen experience that celebrated the birth of new babies and our new brand voice with real-time birth announcements posted across Huggies’ social handles and website.
During the game, real-time tweets to baby explained the ins and outs of the plays, the commercials, and the halftime show, inviting some playful callouts from other brands.
Huggies’ new direction not only saw emotional responses and praise from the general public and moms, but drove impact by keeping the brand top-of-mind, shifting brand perceptions, and inspiring desired consumer actions. The brand was also a category leader in organic search volume for the first time in over three years.
1.3B
Earned impressions
#1
Most emotionally effective ad of the Super Bowl
410+
Social engagements
11pt
Lift in brand sentiment