creative direction · content · media

What Vietnam's Formula Aisle Forgot About Childhood

A group of Vietnamese schoolchildren in white-and-navy uniforms seated outdoors, wearing celebratory paper crowns. Two children in the foreground smile and look toward the camera.

Snapshot

2 min read

Every infant formula brand in Vietnam was selling the same future: a child in a classroom, better grades, a proud mother. The category had flattened brain development into exam prep. Hubert’s team at TBWA Vietnam asked a different question: what if intelligence did not begin in the classroom, but in the way a child first noticed the world?

Background:
As Executive Creative Director, Hubert led the repositioning of Abbott’s Similac around a sharper idea: before a child succeeds in the classroom, she first learns how to make sense of the world. In a category obsessed with grades, Similac shifted the conversation upstream to sensory discovery, positioning early development as the foundation for later academic advantage. The science stayed intact, but the story became warmer, earlier, and more human. The work became TBWA Vietnam’s first international business win and the biggest account in the agency’s history.

Line chart titled Brains, brands and bottles, showing Vietnam's leading infant-formula brands' estimated market share between 2012 and 2016. Abbott's line, in red, sits at the top and rises across the period. The 2014 marker on Abbott's line is enlarged to mark the Similac repositioning launch. — Vietnam's infant-formula market, 2012 to 2016. The enlarged 2014 marker on the Abbott line indicates the Similac repositioning launch.

Composite of the Similac storybook in production and in use. The cover and a double-page spread show illustrated children among falling leaves and rolling waves. Three photographs below show Vietnamese children reading the book in a library, in a classroom, and at home. — Vietnam's infant-formula market, 2012 to 2016. The enlarged 2014 marker on the Abbott line indicates the Similac repositioning launch.

The details:

The reframe moved Similac from "classroom success" to "discovery-based brain development," built on a single proof: sense development is brain development.
The TVC put the mother inside her child's inner world, treating imagination and sensory play as evidence of development happening now, not a future outcome to wait for.
A Facebook community of 250K parents became the participation engine, with mothers sharing daily sensory-discovery moments and giving Abbott a warmer narrative than nutrition claims could carry.
Community submissions were turned into a children's storybook with professional illustrators, which ran out of print twice.
Trained "senses counselors" went into preschools, turning brand messaging into educator-led parent education and giving the campaign a credibility layer outside paid media.
The national platform delivered 100M impressions and a +12 point shift on "supports brain development through discovery" in brand tracking.

Why it matters:
Healthcare and nutrition brands keep mistaking scientific authority for emotional persuasion, and the category pays for it with sameness. Similac showed that proof doesn't have to sound like proof. The brands that win early-childhood categories are the ones that translate science into something a parent can already see happening on the living room floor, then give her a way to talk about it. Sometimes the smartest move a science-led brand can make is to stop leading with the science.