Earth's Best Organic Baby Food

SNAPSHOT:

The category of baby food is dominated by one of the most iconic brands on the planet: Gerber. The category is also flat in its overall growth—except for one area: organic. Leading the way here is Earth's Best Organic Baby Food, which is tearing up the industry with a clear and penetrating message built on a simple premise: nurturing baby the purest way. Mothers everywhere are responding with enthusiasm.

Key Challenge:

The category of baby food is dominated by one of the most iconic brands in the world: Gerber. It's one of the most recognized brands in the world and controls a 70 percent market share.

Earth's Best, the first organic baby food brand to enter the market, was looking for a way to accelerate its growth and to hold off a major challenge in the organic category from Gerber. With Gerber's enormous resources and brand reputation, Earth's Best was concerned that they would lose their leadership position in the category and see their market share go flat or even shrink.

Earth's Best brand communications lacked a common, consistent look. It tended to emphasize the "organic" side of its identity without focusing on the unique set of benefits that that identity could deliver.

The agency’s contribution:

Adamson conducted in-depth planning studies to help Earth's Best achieve a clear sense of its true brand identity. In the process, we found that the brand—even though it lacked the huge market share of Gerber—owned certain strong attributes in the marketplace. Two big things stood out: Earth's Best stood for both "purity" and "nurturing"; Gerber, on the other hand, tended to own less concrete attributes—trust (most importantly) and tradition.

We determined that Earth's Best could differentiate themselves and carve out a strong position with a "nurturing through purity" strategy. We injected that strategy into every aspect of their communications—starting with brand advertising but filtering through the language used to describe the brand with a new website, in promotional efforts, and in PR opportunities.

With our position in hand we knew we could not just push brand message to our consumer. We had to engage moms in the conversation and ask them to contribute to it. We used social media tools like YouTube, and Facebook to build buzz for the brand and ask moms to help narrate the Earth’s Best story. Moms answered the call, submitting Earth’s Best feeding videos, contributing feeding tips and promoting Earth’s Best products on our behalf.

Adamson also applied its Customer Journey process to studying how Earth's Best interacted with moms. We discovered numerous opportunities to engage moms even during pregnancy—an ideal time to connect with them before Gerber's iconic image would influence them after they gave birth. The Customer Journey helped us devise an ongoing brand ambassador program that used enthusiastic Earth's Best customers as advocates for the brand.

Market results:

Even in a recessionary economy where cost is a critical factor, the Earth's Best brand is thriving. It has grown 44% in the past year (according to IRI) and the brand is number one in the organic baby food category—staving off a major challenge from Gerber Organic.

We launched a content rich website to showcase Earth’s Best leadership in organic foods and infant nutrition. Moms have responded to the updates by soaking up the information and digging deep into the site. In the first month of the release, pageviews increased 90% and average time spent on the site increased by over 40 seconds.

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