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.

Kraft Heinz - Swear Like a Mother

CREDITS

Gold partners