Digital Marketing

BabyCenter Creating a Social Brand

ByJennifer Aaker, Debra Schifrin

2012 | CaseNo. M341

In 2012BabyCenter was the largest parenting platform and parenting media company inthe world. It provided expert advice to pregnant women and new mothers whileconnecting these women to each other online and in person. The company had 110employees, with operations in 23 regions around the world in 14 languages. Thecase provides students with a practical, real world example of how to create andgrow a social brand. It details how BabyCenter evolved as a social brandthrough implementing several mechanisms: cultivating employee innovation,creating customer communities, empowering influencers, and enabling greatstorytelling. BabyCenter cultivated employee innovation through its three-dayBabyCenter Innovation Days, held every six weeks. These days involvedbrainstorming sessions, breaking into cross-departmental and intra-departmentalteams, and presenting innovative business ideas to the rest of the company.These ideas directly benefited the company, as 60 to 70 percent of them went tomarket. BabyCenter created customer community online through an interactivewebsite, and in the real world through BabyCenter Birth Clubs. Using thecustomer data it collected, the company connected women in the same stage ofpregnancy to each other to form the clubs, which served as social organizationsand support networks. Through its robust web analytics and surveys, BabyCenteridentified its most active and trusted online users, the influencers, andworked deliberately to cultivate its relationships with them. One way thecompany did this was through launching a social campaign highlighting severalinfluencer moms who worked with charitable organizations. BabyCenter alsounderstood and embraced the power of stories to create brand value, and it gavecustomers the opportunity to tell their own stories through the website andbeyond.