The Nestle Family twitstorm

I've been in the Nati for the past two days, where, in addition to presenting some kickass work and attending a brainstorm with my clients, I've been sampling Skyline Chili and Graeter's ice cream, watching Glee from a giant bathtub at the Cincinnatian Hotel and following the #Nestlefamily twitstorm.

You see, Nestle invited a bunch of parent bloggers to their headquarters for two days. They are far from the first major packaged goods company to invite bloggers in for a little wining and dining. The mom blogger junkets started in earnest with Johnson & Johnson's Camp Baby (which I was invited to but didn't attend back in early 2008), and since then Kraft, Campbell's, General Mills and Frito-Lay have all feted well-known mom bloggers.

As a marketer, I think the mom blogger invitationals are brilliant. For the cost of a few plane tickets, samples and meals, you get hundreds of media mentions and an instant brand ambassador with huge reach. It's a bargain. You also get to focus group these women (and a few men) and find out what's important to them, culling information you can use for product development, advertising and a variety of other purposes.

But what do the mombloggers get out it, aside from a free trip and a chance to hang with friends? Are they building their visibility and personal brand at the cost of being viewed as a sellout? And, in the case of the Nestle invitational, are they shilling for a corporation many view as unethical?

Like most people, I'm aware of the horrors Nestle inflicted in the third world in the 1970s and 80s with its aggressive marketing of infant formula. I saw it with my own eyes when I lived in Pakistan in the late 1980s. But I thought things had changed. Phd in Parenting, in this exhaustive post, claims abuses continue and challenges bloggers to decline Nestle's invitation or at least ask the company some tough questions while there.

For those who complain that mommybloggers are a bunch of navel-gazing ninnies (as some have with regard to the Motrin Moms twitstorm), behold the discussion of Nestle's corporate ethics that emerged on Twitter yesterday under the #nestlefamily hashtag. A few well-meaning moms were raising real questions about global issues to a company that said it wanted to open the channels of communication, but it quickly devolved into a shouting match pitting breastfeeding advocates against defensive formula feeders who perhaps didn't understand that formula feeding can be extremely dangerous in a country where access to safe, clean water isn't guaranteed or where parents might run out of funds for formula and end up watering it down to save money.

Peppered between these posts were silly little tweets from attendees talking up Nesquik, Stouffer's meals and cake mix recipes and psycho crackpots accusing Nestle of supporting infanticide and child labor. It was train wreck, in my opinion.

Shortly after I posted this, friend and fellow Chicago Moms Blogger Kim Moldofsky tweeted me with "I was waiting for the part about what to do next time or lessons learned." I'm not sure I have any real answers. What I do know is that bloggers love attention (I'm no exception). So when a big, multi-national corporation romances us, we get a little weak in the knees. It's easy to get swept off your feet in a flurry of four-star hotel stays, airline tickets and gifts. But take it from someone who knows what's happening on the brand side: don't be a cheap date. Don't tweet and blog free word-of-mouth because you've been wined and dined and you're so very much in love. Do your do diligence (research, ask tough questions, demand better products and service) and then, if you're still the brand's number 1 fan, by all means sing their praises from the rooftops.

Worth reading:

Crunchy Domestic Goddess: Did we learn anything from the Nestle Family Twitter-storm?

Pop Discourse: On Bloggers, Breastfeeding, Formula, Mortality, Change and the Nestle Family Event

This baby formula is poison

Even though I've officially joined the ranks of those moms practicing "extended breastfeeding" (that is, if nursing once a day counts), I cringe every time I hear someone call formula "poison." It's not poison; while it isn't an exact replica of breastmilk, kids thrive on the stuff.

Except in China, where at least 6000 infants have been poisoned by melamine-laced baby formula. Remember the pet food scandal that caused kidney failure and killed thousands of dogs and cats? Same stuff.

A little connoisseur of milk

My daughter is nearly 6 months old and frankly I'm tired of pumping twice a day at work. I've resolved to drop a pumping session and provide just two 4oz bottles of breastmilk for her to enjoy while I'm away. I figured Daddy or her daycare provider can give her a bottle of formula once a day as a supplement. Sounds like a plan, right?

Not when your daughter can smell the Enfamil a room away. We've tried giving her bottles made up of half expressed milk and half formula, but she gags, bawls and pushes it away. Today my husband called me to report she'd refused a bottle made up of 3/4 breastmilk to 1/4 formula. I could hear her wailing in the background. We're dipping into my frozen stockpile of milk to get through this transition, but my hopes of part-weaning her at 9 months so that I can give up pumping altogether are fading fast.

Have any other mothers dealt with this? Do infant formula brands taste substantially different? Is it true soy formula is sweeter than the regular cow's milk stuff? I want to continue the nursing relationship, but on my terms. I don't want to be a slave to flanges, valves and cold packs--particularly as I'm finding it harder and harder to duck out of meetings to pump.

Cross-posted to Chicago Moms Blog

The pumping puzzle: how much is my milk really worth?

Breastfeeding isn't just "best for baby," it gets me the most bang for my buck. Right? Well, yeah. But the cost savings aren't as dramatic as I'd hoped.

I'm returning to work in two weeks and planning to pump for at least a couple of months. I'm dedicated to nursing, but my breastpump doesn't engender the same warm fuzzy feelings as my baby, so I decided to calculate how much I'm saving by pumping versus supplementing while my child is in my husband's or daycare provider's care. I figured that putting a dollar amount to my efforts would solidify my commitment to pump. I could add up the savings and treat myself to a little shopping spree with the cash I'd saved by not buying formula. (And in case you're wondering, I'm not figuring in the cost of the pump since it already paid for itself with baby #1.)

So here goes. The first real math I'd done since high school calculus.

First, let's assume Baby A will drink three 4-ounce bottles while I am at work, for a total of 12 ounces of milk while I'm away. A 25.7oz (large) can of Enfamil or Similac formula costs $22.99 on sale at Walgreens. You can prepare 160 fluid ounces per can, and assuming none gets wasted, that works out to 13 days worth of daycare/daddy care supplementation. Which means I'm saving a grand total of $2.00 per workday by pumping. Yikes, I don't even earn a latte for my efforts!

Depressing, huh? It gets better. In my efforts to make sure Baby A accepts a bottle when I return to work, I've been pumping at home and saving the excess. I've got a freezer full of expressed milk in zipper bags--probably 250-300 ounces worth. I, like many moms in my position, like to refer to it as liquid gold, but it's probably only the nutritional equivalent of $40 worth of powdered formula.

Now I have saved a significant pile of money by breastfeeding Baby A exclusively for the first three months of her life: $400 by even the most conservative estimates. And that doesn't account for all of the breastmilk she's drunk, spit-up and demanded more of. That'll buy me a new winter coat and some cute cashmere cold weather accessories, but no luxury vacation.

Yet, while I'm only earning about $4 an hour for sitting in a windowless, featureless room with a mechanical milking machine hooked up to my boobs, I still feel a compulsion to keep it up, at least for a little while. Maybe I feel like I can't supplement my second kid more than I did my first. Maybe I'm doing it for the feeling of accomplishment I get from nourishing my children, even when I am away. Surely a big part of it is my desire to keep my supply up enough that I won't have to mix up and and warm up a bottle of formula in the middle of the night. (I'm lazy like that.)

But can I say I'm doing it to save money? Not so much, unfortunately.

Cross-posted to Chicago Moms Blog

Let's go with the ads that don't work

That seems to be the direction the US Government gave advertising creatives after the politically connected formula companies got wind of a startling ad campaign designed to highlight the risks associated with not breast-feeding. According to this Washington Post article:

"Officials met with dozens of focus groups before concluding that the best way to influence mothers was to delineate in graphic terms the risks of not breast-feeding, an approach in keeping with edgy Ad Council campaigns on smoking, seat belts and drunken driving. For example, an ad portraying a nipple-tipped insulin bottle said, 'Babies who aren't breastfed are 40% more likely to suffer Type 1 diabetes.'

Gina Ciagne, the office's public affairs specialist for the campaign, said, 'We were ready to go with our risk-based campaign -- making breast-feeding a real public health issue -- when the formula companies learned about it and came in to complain. Before long, we were told we had to water things down, get rid of the hard-hitting ads and generally make sure we didn't somehow offend.'"

So instead of getting mothers to sit up and take notice (and potential raise our country's dismal breast-feeding rates (estimated to be 30 percent at 6 months), we're spending lots of taxpayer dollars on ads we know will be ineffective.

Now I can see how the images in the proposed campaign might make moms who have chosen to formula feed (or tried unsuccessfully to breast-feed) feel bad about their choices. But good, effective advertising is never milquetoast--it needs to grab attention and start conversations. It's sad (but not surprising) our current administration is kowtowing to industry lobbyists on issues of women and children's health.

Click here to see the proposed campaign and let me know what you think.

Cross-posted to Chicago Moms Blog

Which formula company loves me best?

Those who know me well may be surprised to find I gave my name and due date to all three major formula companies. After all, I'm a dedicated supporter of breastfeeding. Heck, I returned to work with a pump over my arm and nursed Z for a full year.

But the marketer in me knows that no one's mastered direct mail and relationship marketing quite like the baby milk manufacturers. By signing up for their "clubs,' I get to see their techniques up close and personal. And I get free coupons and samples which I can pass along to friends or put to use when I eventually start supplementing!

To even the playing field, I signed up for Similac's Welcome Addition Club, Enfamil Family Beginnings and Nestle Good Start's Very Best Baby in the same manner, online. I joined each program on February 3rd, and I honestly answered their surveys (second child, breastfeeding with some supplementation, due date of July 14...)

All three programs sent me periodic emails on pregnancy and baby's development, most of which I dutifully ignored. Then the good stuff came. Nestle was first to my mailbox with a cardbox mailer containing two high-value formula checks and a DVD on baby care. I passed the checks along to a neighbor since I've never used Nestle and they didn't have generous expiration dates anyway. But my two year old likes nothing better than to watch the somewhat clinical film's chapters on diapering, bathing and soothing baby. Go figure!

A month or so later I got package from Similac containing more formula checks and two small sample cartons of Similac--regular and soy. I'm sure I'll end up giving the soy formula away since I never used it with Z.

But the best came last: today Enfamil delivered two full size canisters of Enfamil Lipil along with a formula check and the requisite pamphlet on feeding.

So I'm going to have to conclude that Enfamil loves me best. At least until I check into West Suburban Hospital, which has a contract with Similac. Meaning I'll likely get more samples and an ugly diaper bag upon checkout.

And if last go round was any indication, the love doesn't end with birth. I can expect to receive formula checks in the mail for a year!