How KidKraft improves products through customer feedback

KidKraft captures the voice of the customer and uses feedback to improve products and market messaging

KidKraft, a manufacturer of children’s products that focuses on traditional play with modern touches, markets its products to parents, who are some of the toughest critics. Whether shopping for dollhouses, kitchens, trains, furniture, outdoor playhouses, swing sets, other pretend play products, parents are extremely concerned about a product’s safety and quality and want to know they’re making the best choices for their kids.

To give parents confidence in their buying decisions, KidKraft uses reviews to let shoppers see what other parents – who they trust most – say about their experience with the products.

“Reviews and what real consumers are saying, that is your brand and can make or break you in a lot of ways,” said Taylor Herrero, Senior Ecommerce Marketing Manager at KidKraft.

The brand has collected 56,000 reviews and syndicated the content to more than 50 retail sites globally. As a result, KidKraft has nearly 100,000 reviews across the Bazaarvoice network and 100% review coverage where a majority of shoppers buy.

Valuable insights from customers informs critical business decisions

KidKraft’s partnership with Bazaarvoice gives the brand more insights from its ratings and reviews, questions and answers, and other forms of user-generated content (UGC). Bazaarvoice Insights provides KidKraft with an automated way to understand what customers are saying about its products and see recommended actions the brand can take to improve its marketing strategy and design better products.

Recognizing the value of customer feedback in reviews, the business recently rolled out a new process for closing the loop from customer feedback back into product development and marketing by conducting a quarterly analysis of product-level customer sentiment. The team communicates the learnings from the feedback to other areas of the company that also benefit from consumer insights.

Building better products to meet the needs of customers

Reviews show KidKraft which products aren’t meeting parents’ needs and surface actionable ways to improve products.

“We work really closely with the product development team to make sure that if we see consistent issues or questions being raised by consumers, we can go back and address that by making changes to the actual product,” said Heather Stables, Director of Consumer Engagement at KidKraft.

For example, reviews and customer photos showed KidKraft that many customers were DIYing one of its popular playhouses by painting them white and giving them modern touch. After spotting this new use case, KidKraft developed a white version of this playhouse, which makes it easier for customers to customize the look. The team has seen significant sales success of the new version.

Marketing improvements fueled by insights

Reviews and trends uncovered by Bazaarvoice Insights allow KidKraft to also refine its product positioning and create more compelling marketing messaging.

“There are many examples of what we’ve learned from reviews on how our consumers are using our products that we can use in marketing material,” said Stables.

Recently, reviews of KidKraft’s Building Bricks Play N Store Table showed the brand that parents loved the storage bin underneath the table, which is a feature KidKraft did not highlight on the product page. After spotting the positive sentiment, KidKraft edited the features section of the product page and marketing copy to showcase the table’s storage.

“From a marketing standpoint, it’s really important to lean on your reviews to do some of the heavy lifting for you, particularly if you have a bit of a scrappy marketing budget,” said Herrero.

Reaping the rewards of a successful partnership

The company’s success in deeply understanding its customers and products plays a major role in KidKraft’s ability to consistently inspire imaginative play for children.

“It has been a fascinating experience to see how reviews have become so important in the consumer journey,” said Stables. “Companies are starting to think about them differently and about how they affect the entire consumer journey.”

KidKraft credits its long partnership with Bazaarvoice as playing a significant role in ultimately turning parents from skeptical shoppers into happy customers.

“We’ve been partners for over seven years. Bazaarvoice is by far your best choice and excellent partners,” said Stables.