A Famous Baby’s First Word? Hint: It’s Not Mama

By Stuart Elliott

Published: February 21, 2011

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IN a dictionary of brand names, you can find “Clicquot Club” beverages, pronounced “KLEE-ko”; De Cecco pasta, pronounced, roughly, “Day CHECK-o”; and Chico’s, the retailer of women’s clothing, pronounced “CHEE-ko’s.”

Now, a purveyor of baby products, well known overseas, wants its brand name to be on more American lips — and said properly, too. The brand is Chicco, pronounced “KEE-ko,” which is owned by an Italian company, the Artsana Group.

A campaign for Chicco, now under way, invites parents to enlist their offspring in the pronunciation lessons: Make a video clip of your baby saying “Chicco” and it could appear on a billboard in Times Square.

The campaign also includes print advertisements, content on a section of a Web site (chiccousa.com/timessquare), online ads, outreach through so-called mom bloggers and a presence in social media like Facebook and Twitter.

The campaign, from the Artsana USA division of Artsana, carries the theme “If you say it right, it makes you smile.” The budget is estimated at just under $5 million.

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The campaign is being created by the flagship New York office of McCann Erickson Worldwide, part of the McCann Worldgroup division of the Interpublic Group of Companies. The McCann Erickson Italian operation, based in Milan, is the agency for Chicco in other parts of the world.

The campaign is among many that have tried to school American consumers on the correct pronunciations of the names of brands, particularly those of foreign origin.

Radio listeners of a certain age may still recall commercials to introduce a Spanish sangria, Yago, pronounced “Eee-AH-go,” which were built around the repeated recitation of the name.

“It wasn’t like we needed McCann to launch us,” said William Hasse — pronounced, by the way, “HASS-ee,” rhyming with “Lassie” — who is the vice president for marketing at Artsana USA in Lancaster, Pa., as the Chicco brand has been in this country since the mid-1990s.

Rather, “McCann helped us to discover we had very low spontaneous brand awareness,” he added, especially among a crucial target audience of first-time parents.

It was time to tackle that challenge, Mr. Hasse said, as Chicco has attained national distribution in chains like Babies “R” Us, Target and Toys “R” Us.

One goal is to inform potential customers that Chicco is “a 360-degree master brand,” he added, offering “everything you need for your baby age 0 to 36 months, except diapers and food.”

A related goal is to tell them Chicco is “a brand intent on baby happiness,” Mr. Hasse said, that is “not Chinese and not Spanish.”

“It’s Italian,” he added, “and it’s pronounced ‘KEE-ko.’ ”

The Italian origin is important to convey because of the positive image for baby products from Italy, made by companies like Peg Perego as well as Chicco.

Chicco’s strollers, car seats, travel systems, toys, highchairs, portable play yards and other merchandise are priced as a premium brand for the mass market. They cost less than brands like Peg Perego and Bugaboo but more than brands like Graco.

Some videos that have been uploaded to chiccousa.com can be watched in a gallery there. Children shout “Chicco,” chant it, sing it and even dance while singing it.

In many clips, parents, off-camera, can be heard prompting their children to say “Chicco.” Sometimes the children respond by saying the name over and over and over again.

“You couldn’t do that in an ad,” Thom Gruhler, president at McCann Erickson New York, said of the repetition.

“What we’re trying to do is to establish Chicco as a brand from Italy that makes high-quality products,” he added. “When people said ‘Chico,’ they thought it was from China or Mexico or somewhere else.”

The idea behind the theme of “When you say it right, it makes you smile” is that “when the target is let in on the secret,” Mr. Gruhler said, “it’s the ultimate currency.”

“They want to share it and pass it along,” he added. And of course, social media make it easier to do that.

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“Who wouldn’t want to put their kid up in Times Square and then post it to every social network Web site?” Mr. Gruhler asked rhetorically.

The videos will run on a giant billboard on the new American Eagle Outfitters store at Broadway and West 46th Street. The LED screen is displaying the Chicco clips twice an hour, Mr. Hasse said, at 15 and 45 minutes after the hour.

A company called Aerva is providing the technology by which the consumer-generated clips migrate to the billboard from the Web site. The videos began running on the billboard on Feb. 14 and are scheduled to continue through March 13.

The print ads are in publications like The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Magazine and People magazine. The online part of the campaign is on Web sites like babble.com, babycenter.com, cafemom.com, huffingtonpost.com andmommycast.com as well as sites that are part of the Glam.com network.

Universal McCann, a sibling of McCann Erickson New York, is handling the media part of the campaign.

Spending to advertise Chicco in major American media totaled $2.45 million in 2008, according to Kantar Media, a unit of WPP, then fell the following year to $688,000.

Last year brought an increase, as ad spending totaled $2.7 million through the first nine months of 2010, Kantar Media reported, compared with $611,000 for the same period of 2009.