Ready for Ten: a parent-powered web service for Robinson’s Fruit Shoot (Britvic)

Fruit Shoot is the UK’s most popular kids’ brand which, over the past two years with its lead agency BBH, has run a highly successful kids skills campaign to encourage six to nine year olds in their growing independence. In a crowded marketplace, Fruit Shoot needs to be front of mind with parents in order to stay at #1.

Britvic was looking for a different way to communicate with Fruit Shoot shoppers. As a kids brand, it was a challenge to cut through and talk to mums, dads and grandparents via traditional advertising. The brief Made by Many were given was to come up with a platform that would enable the brand to build long-term engagement with this group.

Our approach

We decided to focus on creating utility to make life easier for parents of this age group. Looking at existing parenting communities, all ages are well catered for except six to nines; we sought to plug this gap. And we wanted to create something that would generate earned media for the brand, promoting discussion around the things that matter to parents of six to nine year olds.

An integrated team of Made by Many creatives, service and information designers and developers, worked collaboratively with BBH planners and Fruit Shoot’s Senior Brand Manager. This approach ensured that strategy and the project evolved in tandem, as we iteratively developed the proposition, tested it and pushed it live.

We launched with the smallest viable release – a parenting blog – and have grown the site from there. The platform will continue to evolve over the next 2-3 years.

How it all went

Ready for Ten plugs a gap in the parenting community and provides support uniquely for parents of six to nine year olds

We worked at a quick pace, sketching initial ideas and testing them at the earliest opportunity with mums, who gave invaluable feedback, which enabled us to reshape and refine the service.

With each iteration of the site, we evolve the design to incorporate the increased richness of the proposition, and we continue to test ideas and designs with mums.

Currently, Ready for Ten includes parenting and expert posts, real-time conversation from Twitter, a VIP Club and skills-related content including the Skillscape. Skillscape is a community intelligence project where parents share the best-loved, least-known places for kids to play and practice skills.

Six months in, traffic is steady and growing, the @ReadyforTen Twitter community is going strong. The service has an increasing bank of talented writers and there is evident engagement in the parent blogging community.

Britvic remains committed to the service and to improving it through ongoing testing and user feedback sessions.