A Little Help from Little Tikes
Little Tikes is a world-renowned manufacturer of innovative children’s toys and hugely focussed on ‘playing big’. Play is how children learn – it helps them build vital skills that will carry them through life. And this thinking is at the heart of everything Little Tikes does. The country went into lockdown in March 2020 and at such a difficult time, Little Tikes wanted to inspire and help parents as we all stayed at home.
The challenge
We’ve worked with Little Tikes for years, having designed and built the brand’s award-winning website, and since continue to lead creative campaigns. As the government announced we’d be going into lockdown and closing schools in an attempt to manage the spread of coronavirus, this would inevitably mean pausing our summer plans for Little Tikes’ marketing and creative activity. Instead, the team at Little Tikes required content and inspiration on the site via a campaign that would help parents during a difficult time.
It would be the focus of a month-long campaign of fun activities and downloadable games so children could continue to ‘Play Big’ within the confines of their own home. The campaign needed to resonate with parents at a time when emotions were high and people fearful, as well as pitch Little Tikes as the ‘friend’ on hand with ideas to ensure children didn’t get bored and would continue their learning and developing.
The solution
Many of us are parents ourselves at The Bigger Boat and this project is one that’s close to our hearts. We understood the worries and dilemmas of parents up and down the country as we felt them too – so we were able to tackle this project with the right amount of sensitivity, alongside bucketloads of creativity and panache. Following Little Tikes’ request, we researched all kinds of activities families could have fun with at home (even if they didn’t have a garden).
We created ‘A little help from Little Tikes’ – a whole range of activities, including using our in-house illustration skills to create fun, easy-to-follow drawing tutorials, and designed coordinating downloadable activity sheets for each of them. We built the homepage that would house these recipes, tutorials and crafts, and released an activity every few days to help inspire parents’ imagination and ensure children continued to have fun throughout lockdown.
We also created a fun Instagram filter that little ones could use to find out which Cozy Coupe© they’re most like.
‘A little help from Little Tikes’ was designed to release activities in the build-up to The World’s Biggest Play Date – a huge play event that brought families together digitally to follow our more detailed content and inspiration. The event was celebrated in the US too.
Throughout the project, we took care that wording wasn’t scaremongering in any way and, through an uplifting and friendly tone of voice, communicated a key positive of staying at home: quality family time. For this project, we worked with Carousel PR, who helped drive engagement on social media.
Kara Clifford
Graphic designer, The Bigger Boat
