Saturday, November 26, 2011

The Issues Which You Need to Have to Know Concerning The Next Baby Competition

By Andrew Jams


One of Europe's most popular retail brands created a model competition for babies. The NEXT baby competition started last October 2010 and was created in search for the 'superbabymodel'. The NEXT baby competition was opened for infants up to 36 months of age and created quite a lot of buzz, both positive and negative nationwide.

With over half-a-thousand stores all over U.K. and Ireland and 50 scattered franchises all across Europe, Asia, and even the Middle East, it was a no-brainer that the Next baby competition would be drawing in a lot of attention and participation. The prices at stake are a 12-month modeling contract with the Urban Angels agency, 500 pounds worth of Next vouchers and an official photo shoot for Next and Prima Baby magazine.

The Next baby competition was a big hit and aroused interests of so many parents. However, this baby competition was surrounded with a lot of issues that the company did not anticipate. One major issue was that the entries had to be submitted via Facebook. There was an influx of participants and the event organizers weren't able to prepare in order to handle the situation. It also did not help that voting was also done online. Thousands of entries were submitted.

Parents started to act very aggressively online just to get votes or Facebook 'likes' in favor of their little angels. Some created various gimmicks such as making videos and posting on YouTube to garner more attention and votes. Parents started going against each other and it even reached a point wherein they were actually sending and receiving hate mails from their fellow participants. Imagine thousands of entries, and the organizers were simply struck with awe and were not able to respond quickly.

Another major problem for the Next baby competition arose when a mother got denied with her entry of her baby who has a birthmark on the face. Organizers supposedly rejected the entry saying that they do not accept children with make-up on.

What Next thought as a very clear-cut and simple baby competition turned out to be a logistical nightmare. The organizers behind the Next baby competition were not able to fully strategize and create plan B and perhaps a plan C if in case things would go out-of-hand and it was very unfortunate for them that things did indeed go way out-of-hand.

Although the organizers behind the Next baby competition was clearly at fault, the overly aggressive parents also need a bit of blaming for how messy the baby competition turned out to be. These parents took the competition to a whole new level of competitiveness just to have their baby's one-way ticket straight to fame.

The Next baby competition was supposed to be a healthy competition showcasing babies' natural charms. However, it seems that the "beauty pageant attitude" carried on to this competition as well and it did not turn out as expected.

There's nothing wrong with the concept of the Next baby competition, it was just a case of mismanagement and the itch for fame.




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