Maternity care drive hits home

By SIMON HENDERY

They don't realise it at the time, but babies have long been a goldmine for marketers.

Proof can be found from a quick flick through the advertisement-packed pages of Little Treasures magazine, which has a circulation most New Zealand publications can only dream of - over 46,000.

Nappies, wipes, formula, toys and much more - the glossy ads in Little Treasures are testament to the relentless push by an entire industry to part parents of newborns from their money.

And a Masterton couple's legal claim for $98,000 to raise their fourth child after a failed vasectomy illustrates there is a big pool of spending to fight over for businesses pitching for the baby-care dollar.

Auckland woman Heidi Collins, the mother of two under-five-year-olds, is developing a niche position in the child-raising marketing environment.

Since May, her company Maternity Essentials has been giving out product sample "ME Packs" to expectant mothers throughout Auckland.

While expectant and new parents are already deluged with free samples of baby care products before and after birth, Collins says her service is unique because it contains a range of skin care toiletries and pregnancy products focused on the mother's well-being, rather than the baby's.

The concept was very attractive to product suppliers, she said, who recognised it gave them captive access to a powerful group of consumers.

Societal change that was seeing more mothers return to paid employment after childbirth meant mothers were an increasingly affluent sector of society, and had more spending power than previously.

"When you become a mother you become even more powerful [as a consumer] because then you make choices on behalf of the whole family," Collins said.

She started developing the business a year ago and has worked with Auckland hospitals, midwives, obstetricians and GPs to gain their support for the concept.

Lead maternity carers give patients sign-up forms for the ME Packs at about 28 or 30 weeks into the pregnancy. The packs are then couriered to the women's homes.

Collins said the business was on target to distribute 20,000 packs a year. Follow-up surveys revealed 90 per cent of women said they were introduced to a new product through the pack.

The most popular item was a Schick razor, with more than 90 per cent of women indicating they would convert to the brand and intended to buy refill blades for the razor supplied in the pack.

"When I asked them why they said it was because they hadn't even thought about using a razor [during pregnancy]," Collins said.

"We're presenting them with a razor when they needed it."

A voucher in the pack for top-end fruit drink Kiwi Crush had been redeemed by 40 per cent of women receiving the pack, and a further 40 per cent said they intended to use the voucher when they got around to it.

Lianne Clarke, marketing manager for Kiwi Crush manufacturer Vital Foods, said the response rate had exceeded expectation and was higher than traditional direct marketing campaigns. "It's easy advertising for us - it's delivered to the door of the person, and invariably in our experience it is the woman who tends to be the decision maker when it comes to what the family may or may not consume.

"And for us it was bang-on target market."

Collins said she intended to extend the ME Pack concept, using it to target specific industries.

"It's a new concept for targeting and developing relationships rather than just blanketing everybody. We've got about 15 packs we know we can get out there to different industries, different target markets. We could do children, we could do teenagers, we could do travellers. It's just a matter of developing them."

Maternity Essentials