The Campaign

At present, for Japanese women, “Ikumen” is said to be the ideal partner and amidst all this Kagawa prefecture is aiming to become a prefecture which is easy to rear a child and has implemented an “Ikumen scheme” worthy of an udon prefecture. That is IkuMEN rather than Ikumen. That is IkuMEN (Noodle) rather than Ikumen. As a product to make people aware of lessening the child rearing burden of women and child rearing participation of men, udon to support child rearing, “IkuMEN” was developed which is easy to feed to a baby and easy to cook.

Creative Execution

Kagawa Prefecture distributed the child-raising support udon (wheat noodle) named “Ikumen (noodles to have a positive effect on the development of children)” on January 19, so-called “Ikuji-no-hi (child-raising day)”, at event sites and on the web. At the same time, Kagawa released "IkuMEN" PR video on the web site. In addition, together with a local culinary expert, an IkuMEN recipe was created which helped the daily grind of child rearing.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

“IkuMEN” as expected from an udon prefecture was taken up by various media and it became a topic of conversation with people saying things like “Oh, that Ikumen!” and “As expected, from an udon prefecture!” Even though there was no media budget, news of IKU-MEN was covered by many TV programs and web news, which provided us with a combined advertising value of $1,500,000. For the result, Kagawa’s image of “pouring all effort into assisting child rearing” has jumped from 26.6% to 79.7%. And, IkuMEN which is easy to cook contributed to prompting men’s participation in child rearing in Kagawa. It succeeded in lessening the burden of child rearing of Kagawa's mother.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

Changed people’s awareness of Kagawa prefecture with this work. And also contributed to prompting men’s participation in child rearing.

To attract the audience, especially parents, Kagawa needed to use connect and associate child rearing with Udon, which is the biggest asset of Kagawa. And in Kagawa, many households boil and finely chop noodles for their babies. From the idea that saving people from that trouble would result in helping childcare, childcare support udon “Ikumen” was developed.