When Graco wanted to create an online resource for millions of young parents, LBi shaped a space that welcomed them into a community of likeminded peers.
We sometimes forget that the dialogue between brands and consumers can be powerfully transformed by simply recognizing that a "third world" exists outside the dualistic dynamic of our two-way dialogue. The growth of peer review and third-party content is demonstrating the appeal of broadening the conversation to include a world of consumer critique and feedback. Initially terrified of the blogosphere, big brands have come to embrace the inevitable—good reviews mixed with bad—as a natural and by no means terminal reality of online life.
Our work for Graco allowed us to capture and capitalize on the growth of third party content. As part of Graco Baby's move to more strongly brand and market its product portfolio, the company invested in the creation of a lifestyle site unique to its car seat products, its leading revenue generator. Developing its car seat profile within the context of parenting lifestyle was central to the company's strategy of reshaping its image from that of a manufacturing company to a lifestyle brand deeply linked into the parenting experience.
Graco turned to LBi to invent a new brand destination in the online space—one independent of the Graco.com site and one that served as a potential online home for young parents looking for answers to car seat and related parenting issues. Led by Creative Director Brad Hanna, LBi recognized Graco owned a wealth of existing third-party content—market research, editorial content, a branded blog community, and a network of industry consultants who support product development on a variety of regulatory issues related to car seats.
Developing its online approach around this rich resource, LBi's goal was to position Graco as an "advocate for parents," promoting car seats in the context of a broader environment of educational resources and issue-driven content driven by a range of parental cues. The LBi team wanted to establish, in Hanna's words, "a place customers couldn't find offline—a place parents feel comfortable, and where the brand acts as a trustworthy advocate for your parenting interests and concerns, not only providing perspectives and insights, but also smart solutions. We thought we could create an online space that felt more real than the bricks-and-mortar competition." The resulting site, readyfortheroadahead.com powerfully delivers on the company's promise to offer rewarding and relevant content to young parents.
Engagement and interactivity—via video and Flash to a lesser degree—were critical components of LBi's solution. Within LBi's global network, the Atlanta studio serves as a center of excellence for its video and related interactive capabilities. It played to these strengths for Graco, delivering a highly engaging user experience:video interviews with high-profile parent bloggers; a variety of product videos designed to help users choose a car seat and help them install it; and a car seat selector tool that—based on user input—quickly narrows an inventory of hundreds of car seats down to a handful of seats that fulfill the user's size, color, and design preferences. Collectively, the site delivers compelling paths to engagement with Graco's rich but underutilized content network, and far more accessible product inventories.
"We wanted to create an online space that felt more real than the bricks-and-mortar competition."
"We engaged a number of high-profile parent bloggers to not only blog about Graco car seats but essentially 'all things parenting.'" Creative Director Ivy Garcia adds. "Our goal was to create a community of relevant resources and to connect consumers to the brand through people they trusted—parent bloggers who share the same concerns as they do."
As the third-party videos stimulated interest in the product and established a level of trust in the Graco brand, consumers are invited to use the car seat selector tool to locate products tailored to their needs.
"The selector tool makes finding the right car seat far less intimidating than it used to be by removing the guesswork most parents have to do when shopping for a seat," says Hanna." Questions about whether you are expecting, your child's age and gender, and pattern and palette choices, all help streamline Graco's offering."
As products are selected and purchased, customers are introduced to a range of product videos that both demonstrate various features and provide installation guides. Installation videos are especially useful in developing continuity with customers who have traditionally tended to disappear upon purchase.
"Graco had been experiencing a drop-off in interaction once customers bought their initial car seat. Our goal was to create continuity in the relationship between the brand and the customer by ensuring the brand continued to be relevant to parents," Account Manager Elise Riley notes.
To further the effort to ensure an enduring relationship with customers, LBi created the "Ready. Safe. Go! Club" which invites users to submit a few key statistics about their children—age, birth date, gender—from which LBi crafts unique, time-targeted emails designed to support parents as their children move through four key stages of the car seat lifespan.
To capture the feel of the brand's offline evolution, LBi animated the Graco's existing dot pattern and palette, playing off the site name, Ready for the Road Ahead, to create a Flash "road" of colorful dots that greets users on the home page. Dots were also integrated into the color-coded navigation, which allows customers to begin to navigate principally by color recognition. In further efforts to ensure a unified approach with Graco's offline campaign, LBi collaborated with DoubleSpace in New York, which was handling print collateral, and Graco's public relations team.
Social media was likewise incorporated into the mix to capitalize on cross-linking opportunities, with links established on Twitter, and frequent site opportunities to share videos and upload them to a You Tube page.
The Graco car seat site can be viewed at http://www.readyfortheroadahead.com