What's the matter with kids today? They don't have their own shampoos and lotions.

What's the matter with kids today? They don't have their own shampoos and lotions

Brent Bouchez usually avoids packaged goods accounts like the plague.

"I normally stay about as far away from packaged goods as I can because packaged goods advertising smacks of mediocrity," says the creative director at the Los Angeles office of Ketchum Advertising.

These days, however, Bouchez is working on a packaged goods account and loving it.

His client is a Laguna Hills-based company called KIDS that's marketing a new line of shampoos, soaps, hair conditioners, suntan lotions, lip balm, bubble bath and colognes for kids from infancy through age 12. In all, the company will market 13 products to start and hopes to add more later.

Ketchum has already run ads in retailing trade magazines to convince drug store chains and other mass merchandisers to carry the KIDS line, but the big push for the product begins next week when KIDS launches a national ad campaign in the June issues of consumer magazines like Self, Shape, Redbook and many others (see Ad Campaigns '90 on this page).

KIDS has top management, money behind it, and marketing muscle. The president of the company is Mary George, who guided VLI Corp. through some tough marketing times to make a success of its Today contraceptive sponge. KIDS is actually a division of a parent company, William & Clarissa, whose chairman is William A. Meyer, the founder of the Swensen's ice cream chain.

Ketchum and its KIDS client are betting the new line of products will be a winner because of what they see as a huge, untapped potential to sell personal care items designed for children. The KIDS marketing proposition goes something like this: American parents spend lavishly on all sorts of products for their children, but there isn't a full line of personal care products for kids. There's the niche, and it's a big one.

George says KIDS will spend $5 million on advertising from June through the end of the year. "On an annualized basis, our marketing budget is $15 million," she says. Besides advertising, the company plans consumer promotions, public relations and other marketing support activities.

In Bouchez's words, the KIDS line has a chance to capitalize on a happy fact of American marketing life: "Until now and for the last 40 years, there has only been one option for buying children's shampoo." That option has been Johnson & Johnson's Baby Shampoo. But Bouchez says those days are over for children's shampoos and the whole range of KIDS products.

A $5 million account is an enviable size for just about any ad agency in any market, but the KIDS account could grow to mega-dollar proportions if the new line takes off as George and her ad agency think it will.

The KIDS president is reluctant to estimate just how big the new line may grow, but she says the five top-selling baby care items in the U.S. market approach $500 million in yearly sales. She won't make sales projections, but one trade magazine ad Ketchum prepared for KIDS underscores how open-ended the market growth might be. The ad says U.S. parents spent $60 billion last year on products for babies and children. Retail sales of baby and children's products have increased by 179 percent in the past eight years, the ad says.

Some of the types of products KIDS markets have actually been available for more than a year, but in a different form. Parent William & Clarissa has marketed a similar but more expensive line of children's personal care products since 1988. It has limited distribution to upscale department stores like FAO Schwarz and Bloomingdales.

As George describes it, she hooked up with William & Clarissa after leaving VLI Corp. and forming her own management and marketing consulting firm with executives she had worked with at VLI. She had "a management team but no product" when she discovered the upscale Williams & Clarissa line. She had already seen research on the size and potential of the children's personal care market, so she set about convincing William & Clarissa that it needed to offer its products at lower prices and to market them through drug store chains, supermarkets and other mass marketing outlets rather than high-end department stores. Thus, the KIDS line was born.

The selling points for the new products underscore how many factors advertisers have to be concerned about today. The ads point out the KIDS products are made from, among other things, extracts of plants that are "organically cultivated without pesticides of any kind."

The copy under the headline points out that the KIDS line is alcohol-free, dermatologically tested and "hypoallergenic" -- which the dictionary defines as "less likely to cause an allergic reaction than than other comparable preparations."

Bouchez says the advertising is designed to "get consumers to believe these products not only are designed for their children but are designed by parents."

He says the potential to market children's personal care items has existed for a long time, but few companies have been willing to enter the market because it is dominated by giants like Johnson & Johnson. He sees a big niche for KIDS, however, because he thinks consumers today want more choices. Until now, he says, there have been minor entries in the children's personal care category but no major product line introductions. He says of the KIDS products, "I think this line is going to be huge."

George says the new products are already on the shelves in some stores in anticipation of the June product launch. The company has lined up 10,000 outlets to start and hopes to have 20,000 by the end of the year, she says. Eventually, she hopes the line will be in about 40,000 stores.

Bouchez says the KIDS launch has been fun because he's enthusiastic about introducing a new category, getting to do imaginative ads and working with a client who is sincere in listening to its ad agency rather than ordering the agency around as some advertisers are wont to do.

In other words, he says, it's not the typical packaged goods account.

Bob Howard covers advertising, public relations and media in Los Angeles County.