“We deserve a product that's speaking to us, not to our three-week-old baby”: Kim Chappell, Chief Brand Officer at Bobbie
Cutesy giraffes, baby elephants, and ABC wooden blocks all cue ‘baby product’ but babies can’t buy things (at least not on purpose, though the amount of babies who can use an iPhone is somewhat worrying if you have 1-click purchasing enabled), so why is it that classic baby formulas use these cues when speaking to parents, the real decision makers? This was the question that Challenger Brand Bobbie asked. A European-style infant formula but manufactured in the USA, Bobbie’s goal is to change the baby formula category with simple, higher quality ingredients and be a force for good when it comes to improving the lives of American parents and babies. And they do it all in a fun and grown-up way that talks directly to their audience (parents). To find out how the brand is challenging their category, we spoke with Kim Chappell their Chief Brand Officer.
Kim Chappell, Chief Brand Officer at Bobbie
Challengers have ambitions that outweigh their resources. What’s the ambition for Bobbie that drives everything you do?
Our ambition is to uplevel infant formula for American families – full stop. And to allow every family to have access to high quality formulas. We are not only doing the work, we’re advocating to level up our entire industry pushing for nutritional standards to be upleveled. The US hasn't significantly changed their nutritional standards since the 1980s and we know that science has evolved on basic things like including DHA in infant formula. I think ultimately, our goal is to be partners with policy makers and to figure out how we can innovate faster on behalf of all American parents. How do we become the global standard for infant formula, so that other countries want to import US formula, not the other way around?
Challengers (by definition) challenge something – what assumptions in the marketplace or wider society does Bobbie challenge?
There's an assumption that the formula market is a free market, and it's not in America. 50% of the parents in this country are on WIC, which is our women and infant children benefits program. This program currently props up the two major legacy players in this industry and allows them to continue to serve half of the country, even if those parents wouldn't have necessarily opted for that brand of formula. The industry would look incredibly different, and innovation would have happened at the pace of the rest of CPG, if it were a free market and 100% of parents were able to put their money behind brands that they want to support. And I believe all parents deserve that right, whether you are on WIC or paying out of pocket.
Secondly, there's an assumption in this country that breastfeeding is going to be easy, and it should be beautiful, and it should just happen. Anybody who's been through that experience, knows that that's most often not the case. We need to do better for mothers to set them up for success– things like expanded coverage and access to lactation support, especially in those early months, and passing federal paid leave to allow new mothers the time and space to make breastfeeding work. Our current set up in this country does not fundamentally support mothers. That is another thing that we get really loud about at Bobbie, not only because we are a team of moms who are living and breathing that experience, but every single person in our community is living and breathing that same experience. So how can we galvanize our community around some of these shared issues, such as passing paid federal leave? We sit here and wonder why breastfeeding rates aren't going up, but the two have a direct correlation. Breastfeeding takes time. It takes resourcing. It takes focus and energy, and we should give moms that time to be successful. And if we're not, then we certainly shouldn't be placing any judgment or shame on how they choose to feed their babies, which is obviously core to the Bobbie mission.
Tell us about your customer. Who is Bobbie speaking to and how do you make sure they hear you?
Typically, we are speaking to a mom, and she's the friend that likes to research everything. She’s deep in the spreadsheet and she wants the highest quality for her baby. She wants to double click on ingredients. She wants to support a brand that has a purpose – it's not just transactional. She wants to be surprised and delighted, and she wants a best-in-class digital experience. She's used to getting her monthly deliveries for whatever she needs in her life. She just cares deeply about what's in her baby's bottle. It's not an afterthought. It's a very intentional decision. So, we try to meet her in that moment and kind of lift the curtain and say, here's what's in your formula. Here are the benefits of that ingredient. Here's where we sourced it. Here's why we feed it to our own babies and build a layer of trust and transparency with them in a way that I don't think the industry as a whole has been particularly good at.
So, we come in and really try to meet our parents where they're at and not feel like this is a game of dark arts and shadows, but actually, here's how it comes to be, and here's why we're priced the way we're priced, and here's the cow that ate this organic grass in New Zealand that's feeding your baby. Here’s why USDA Organic matters, down to the number of pesticides allowed to be used (0 compared to conventional formulas (hundreds). There's a lot of beautiful and rich storytelling that can go around that, and those little stories and all of the ways in which you can tell people what's happening behind the scenes, builds trust with your customer. This is a product where you need to feel like you can trust this company, because this is going to feed your baby. There's nothing more precious to you as a new parent than: What is your baby eating? Is your baby growing? Is your baby spitting up? Is your baby pooping? It is the centre of your universe for so many months. We recognize that, and we try to educate and meet them through that whole journey.
It's also about how you talk to the parent. What was so perplexing to me coming into this job, was that when we looked at the category, at the cans of formula and the messaging, there were little giraffes and teddy bears and ABC blocks. And I'm like, the baby can't read, okay? The baby doesn't know what's going on. The baby is sitting in a car seat, sleeping while you're purchasing this formula. And I just felt like it was really cheesy, and undermining to women in a way. They're smart, we're smart. We know what we want. We deserve a product that's speaking to us, not to our three-week-old baby. So, I just felt like there was a really good opportunity to actually just talk to the parent. And how do we talk to each other? How do you talk to your friend in your group text? We have a lid sticker that gets a lot of shares that reads “You’re the sh*t.” And it’s intentionally a positive affirmation for whoever is opening the can, speaking directly to that person, not the baby. And that's how we talk to our customer, because there's a level of casualness, friendliness, but also respect – you're not an idiot and we're going to just talk to you like you're one of our friends. That has really been our tone of voice since day one.
How do you maintain the strong Bobbie brand in the content that you put out into the world, particularly when you are speaking more casually?
Sometimes I'll read something that comes through and if there's anything that gives me the ick or feels so cringe, or cheesy, then it just doesn’t feel Bobbie or it's just not what we call ‘Bobbified.’ We really try not to be cheesy, but just to have a little fun and playfulness and talk to our customer in the way that we would want to be spoken to. And that is the beauty, I think, of being a mom-founded and led company, we are living and breathing the same experience as our customers.
Everything that we have done since day one has been so customer centric. We have over-indexed on non-scalable things like you wouldn't believe. And we still do that to this day. So how do we make sure that every customer has a high touch experience? If they DM us, we get back to them instantly with a human, not AI, messaging with them. We pull them into zooms for feedback with our CEO. We surprise and delight and send them gifts in their monthly subscription. We have Ubered formula to a mom stuck at LaGuardia who ran out because her flight was delayed. All of these little moments allow us to continue to treat every mom like we would want to be treated or treat every mom like we would treat one of our celebrity parents.
There's a level of compassion and care in how we show up as real humans across every touch point. There are all of these companies over-indexing on AI, but it just makes the human touch point so much more valuable. And in a space where you're a mom, you don't want to talk to a freaking robot, you want to talk to a mom who's lived it and breathed it, so our customer success team is all real people that answer the phones and reply to texts. I just think that's been a really, really big part of how we've built a beloved brand. It’s that people walk away feeling like they've had this really lovely experience with Bobbie. They felt like they understand our values. We've asked them to take action with us. They feel like they've done more than just buy powdered milk, and then we leave them feeling that they will always recommend us because we helped them accomplish one of the most important things in the first year of life, nourish and feed their new baby. The phrase that we've heard used by one of our customers was that Bobbie offered a layer of “invisible support.” She told us, ‘I always felt like I had a layer of invisible support with your brand.’ That was really beautiful to me.
It's how you think about the typical things, the typical touch points, and how do you reimagine them for a better experience? For us that was when people were canceling their subscription. And you know, any direct-to-consumer business is like, please please don't cancel. They'll bury the button and make it so hard to find, because they don't want you to be able to cancel. But what we realized was, okay, this is different for us, because this person is canceling because their baby is now a one year old and no longer needs formula. It actually means that it's a celebration, and they're graduating off formula and they're headed into the next stage of parenthood. So, we created a whole graduation experience where you go to click Cancel, which is easy to find, you graduate, and you get your whole ‘Spotify Wrapped’ experience of your first year of feeding. It’s how many bottles you made based off of how many cans you ordered, and how many diapers you changed, etc. You get a graduation diploma, and then we invite you to join a graduation ceremony with our CEO, Laura, which we do once a month. It's such a beautiful way to celebrate the shared experience of having gotten your baby to age one. We ask them to put their cameras on because we want to see their faces. And it's this beautiful collage of parents from all over the country celebrating the same moment. We hope that is a finale experience that allows them to go and be an evangelist for the brand. And is that hugely scalable? I don't know, but it's a great moment. We share it on social. We share it in our marketing. We talk about what it means to be a Bobbie grad, so then it becomes a content engine for us as well.
You’ve had some incredible ads over the last couple years, featuring mega stars like Ashley Graham, Naomi Osaka and most recently influencer and chef Molly Baz. Can you tell us about how you came to be working with Molly?
I used to work in news and journalism, and I worked in a 24-hour cycle of content, every single day for 10 years. And I really think it shaped this muscle in me as a marketing leader of like, there is no deadline too tight. Everything can get done. It's the level of perfection that you're seeking that will get in your way. If you're doing a $10 million Super Bowl ad, of course, you should take the time to make sure that it's perfect, but sometimes a sprint and getting everybody running in the same direction over a two-week period is the most efficient way to continue to deliver and have a cadence of content coming out the door. There's a constant reshuffling of the pile of prioritization. I call it ‘breaking news’, and if we've got breaking news and we need to optimize for something that came inbound or fell in our lap, but we're technically too busy to take on another project – well, let's move one over, because we're not going to miss the opportunity. That was the situation with Molly Baz, where we found out she was combo feeding and using Bobbie.
She had gotten her billboard with another brand in the maternal space (in Times Square) taken down because the image of her pregnant belly was deemed inappropriate in May 2024 and so, she had become a bit of a poster child for women's bodies being critiqued by the media. So, when we found out that she was combo feeding with breastmilk and Bobbie, we were like, well, guess we're going to have to put her back on the billboard. We did so not to show her bottle feeding, but to show her breastfeeding her baby, which was what she was doing, while also supplementing with Bobbie. That is a narrative that we have been talking about since the earliest days of this company, based on the research that 70% of parents are combo feeding. Society wants to put us in these feeding wars of breast versus formula, and we don't subscribe to it. It's not the reality. Our job is to amplify the reality of our customers. This is their story. So, we decided to put her breastfeeding on a billboard. She was the first breastfeeding mom on a billboard in Times Square, and it was in the same billboard location where she had been removed before. Justice for moms everywhere!
Getting it up though was a sprint, because basically we found out on a Monday that this was happening, and we're like, okay, can we do this? And then we had a two-week window to pull it off because she had all these projects stacked, and she said that it was either in the next two weeks or it was going to be in 2025. So, it was a parallel job of calling the billboard company, booking a shooter, and trying to lock down a date for her wardrobe and styling. But our creative director had just found out she was pregnant with twins, and she was high risk, so she couldn't go to the shoot. So, we patched together some Bobbie team members to go pull off the shoot in California, and our CD was directing on Zoom, pregnant with twins saying, “Okay, now, lay down this way.” It was just a really beautiful moment. And Molly's campaign was an awesome moment for the brand to show where our values lie – in supporting every feeding journey. We saw a lift in traffic to site and a ton of earned media with her stories and her ads around combo feeding. It was just a reminder that sometimes it's worth it, and you have to roll the dice. It's not always going to be perfect, and it's not always going to be the next big winning campaign, but when you have those opportunities, you have to just go for them. It's so easy in marketing to get bogged down by process and calendars and cross functional work streams and all these things. And I think you have to leave space and room for just the impromptu creativity and the joy and the momentum that can come from a really fun opportunity.
