Kraft Swear like a Mother case study website.
BACKGROUND
How can
a long-standing fixture of American family life continue to earn its place at
the table?
In 2016, Kraft Mac
& Cheese improved its product by removing artificial ingredients, helping
millennial parents feel better about serving it to their families. It worked.
But it wasn’t enough.
The objective in
2017 was to continue to build a relationship with this crucial audience: millennial
parents. And do it in a way that would make people sit up, take notice and talk
about it.
CREATIVE IDEA
As parents, you have one job: to take care of
your kids. But that’s a pretty big job. And sadly, but not surprisingly, no
parent is perfect.
Kraft Mac & Cheese – the perennial
kid favorite – needed to double down on being parents’ ally. Show parents
they are not alone. Normalize ‘parent fails’ as anything but failures. Because
parents are fundamentally well-intentioned. That’s why there’s Kraft Mac &
Cheese. It’s a guaranteed win that can make things right when things go wrong.
STRATEGY
We know parents aren’t saints. But it took a
startling data point and a swearing expert/cussing mom to bring this point home
to millions of Americans.
The goal was to show that Kraft Mac &
Cheese understands the realities of family life. So we created a campaign that
celebrated the honest truth that as hard as they try, parents aren’t perfect.
To ensure the campaign was grounded in truth,
not truisms, we worked with Kraft to survey 1,000 parents about all the
ways parents get things wrong, from mixing up their kids’ names to forgetting
birthdays. Turns out, 74% of moms admit to swearing in front of their kids. (And
that doesn’t account for all the moms who do it but don’t admit to it.)
For Mother’s Day, Kraft teamed up with
swearing expert Melissa Mohr, PhD, to reassure moms that dropping the f-bomb
doesn’t make you a terrible parent.
EXECUTION
The Swear Like a Mother activation launched a week before
Mother’s Day on May 3, 2017. In a two-minute web video, Mohr presented the
eye-popping stats on swearing (letting cursing parents know they’re not alone)
and introduced some family-friendlier oaths, like ‘flippin’ goofnuggets!’ for
those less-than-perfect parenting moments. The long-form video was shared
by influencers and news outlets.
We also created downloadable Mother’s Day
cards that celebrated perfectly imperfect moms and created a little
something to help out in those not-so-motherly moments: ‘fail-cancelling’ earplugs.
The campaign was rounded out with social, digital, print
and TV. The TV spots showed true-to-life scenarios, in which a mom or dad got a
little too caught up in the fun or was a bit oblivious, and how making Kraft
Mac & Cheese redeemed the ‘fail’.
RESULTS
In just nine days, the Swear Like a Mother video amassed
over 4.5 million views, garnered 70 million social impressions and inspired
over 769,000 likes, comments and retweets. All in all, it generated over 387
million impressions worldwide.
On the one day when everyone else puts moms on a
pedestal, Kraft showed them at their worst. Yet coverage was
overwhelmingly supportive: 97% of mentions and conversations had a positive
tone.
The campaign proved that by tackling a difficult topic
with humor, empathy and a heaping bowl of Mac & Cheese, you can get your
target audience talking, tweeting and posting about your brand.