Our Take on “The Sippy Cup 1%”

We really enjoyed the blog post, “The Sippy Cup 1%” by Adam Davidson, which recently ran in the New York Times. It caught our attention because of our successful experience helping Thermos enter the baby product market a few years ago and we have enjoyed participating in and monitoring the growth of the category ever since.

A few parts of his piece really stood out to us, particularly these takeaways that brands should consider before launching new products in this category:

• The baby market is essentially a commodity market given the regulations in place that assure baby products offer the same level of safety, regardless of price point. Due to this he notes that, “In the baby business, the challenge is persuading parents that a product has a unique feature worthy of a price premium.”
• Timing is a major challenge baby product companies must address. “Kellogg’s, Ford and Starbucks can spend years tempting a consumer, but baby companies have a short window – often just the few weeks before a due date – to capture expecting parents’ attention.“

These two challenges Davidson notes were of top consideration when developing our strategy to help Thermos launch their Foogo sippy cup. For starters, Thermos’ sippy cup cost four times as much as competitors and there was as very short window to capture parenting usage of this product. As new product launch specialists, we knew that to be successful it was essential to communicate the product point-of-difference (P-O-D) and give consumers the permission they were seeking to pay more for Thermos’ Foogo. Using our proven approach we were able to do that and even make it a best-selling product for our client.

We hope you’ll read our case study here and let us know what you think of this article.