For newborn parents, even the most basic things can become a source of danger. Heating a baby bottle is one of those things, with hot liquids the leading cause of burns among 0-4-year-olds (source: French Public Health). Especially when parents are away from home, where their usual ‘safe’ ways of testing how hot the milk is aren’t available to them. This is why NUK created First Choice +, a temperature control baby bottle that warns parents when milk is too hot, protecting their babies from being burnt. The brief was to promote this product through a campaign that could explain to parents in the clearest possible way the benefits of owning this innovation instead of a classic feeding bottle as well as to prove NUK’s superiority when coming to protecting babies and reassuring young parents.

To promote a “temperature-controlled” product, we decided to create a “temperature-controlled” campaign through the Safety Squad, a cast of paper guinea pigs embedded into different printed formats: coasters, stickers, flyers, print ads… available in public spaces such as museums, trains or service areas for parents on-the-go, to test the temperature of their milk before giving it to their babies. Prints embarked a thermosensitive ink that was reacting depending on the temperature of the liquid poured over it. We managed to set the reaction temperature at 35°C. After heating the bottle, parents just had to pour a drop of hot milk into the mouth of a squad member. If the milk was too hot, a warning message was displayed on the paper, preventing them from harming their newborns with burns from ingestion. So, parents could feed their babies with a peace of mind, even the ones who didn’t own NUK’s products.

Our target audience was newborn parents just having their first baby, also known as ‘primipara’, and for whom keeping their baby safe can be a source of stress. They usually want to keep their active life habits as much as possible, meaning going outside, meeting friends at restaurant, traveling to see their family… Instead of trying to reach them with a classical campaign, we decided to reproduce NUK’s innovation directly on our campaign and to let them experience real product-demos on multiple touchpoints. We wanted to prove them two things; first being that NUK’s priority is all babies and not only their client’s ones – which is a powerful proof of the brand’s strong engagement towards a true and honest baby care. Second being that NUK’s products are the best for them and for their babies. We deployed the Safety Squad on several kids-friendly places all along their customer journey.

The campaign takes place in France and kicked-off on social media in April by reaching to ‘parents’ influencers with newborns to get the people aware of the risk of burning newborn with hot milk, highlighting Nuk thermosensitive technology that helps preventing those accidents. Meanwhile, we deployed the different experiential print formats with the thermosensitive ink, via a partnership with Paris Mômes magazine, a leading free magazine for parents, available in various locations such as museums, cinemas, organic shops, pediatricians’ office... In parallel, parents could also find other formats in strategic places such as pharmacies, trains, kid-friendly stores, bars, and restaurants to experiment this unique Safety Squad where they need it the most. Turning as many locations as possible into real-life product demos. The activation started in 2022 April and is still running during all summer.

As soon as we launched the Safety Squad campaign, we noticed a strong increase of parent’s interest for this product: +20% requests for Nuk brand on search engines, +25% visitors on the product page and +174% of time spent on the product page. We also noticed a much stronger engagement on digital during the first week of the campaign: +10% of followers on Nuk social account and +139% interactions on social media. We had a strong press coverage in France and our Safety Squad even made it abroad towards 9 countries reaching +76M media impressions. The 10K first copies of our printed formats were out of stock in 5 days. And last but not least, we rose parents’ consciousness about burning risks with hot liquids and provided them with a concrete and free solution: our client’s baby-bottle.