What You Will Need to Know Concerning The Next Baby Competition

Next, a well-known retail company all-over Europe, started looking for the first ever 'superbabymodel' through the Next Baby Competition, which started last October 2010. The competition was open for infants up to 36 months of age. But instead of garnering positive reviews, the Next competition ended up being tarnished with much negative buzz.

The NEXT retail has over 500 stores all over U.K., Ireland and about 50 franchise branches in Europe, Asia, and Middle East. A sub-department of the company, the NEXT Baby Boutique partnered up with Prima Baby magazine and the leading junior model agency, Urban Angels, to come up with the Next baby competition where the winning baby can win 500 pounds worth of NEXT vouchers, a 1 year modeling contract with Urban Angels and will also participate for a photo shoot for the Prima Baby and the NEXT 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.

An even uglier situation arose when parents started to act aggressively just in order to get votes for their little bundle of joy. Some even created YouTube videos in order to attract more attention and more 'likes' for their baby's entry. Some parents even received hate mail from other participants because of this. What's worse for some parents is that their entries aren't even featured at all. Due to an overwhelming response, the organizers were having a hard time moderating the Facebook page and were not able to accommodate all entries as quickly as possible.

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.

Both the organizers and parents are to blame for what mess the Next baby competition turned out to be. This competition proved that there are really superficial parents who would give anything for their babies to have their 15 minutes of fame.

The Next baby competition was supposed to be a medium in which to highlight babies' natural grace, charm and innocence through a very friendly competition. Logistical miscalculations and the need for superficial aspirations got in the way and ruined what was planned.

The Next baby competition truly had a positive goal-at-hand-and maybe next time, they'd be better equipped and prepared.