Treasure to Trash and Back Again

According to Erin Merani, Hatch’s vice president of marketing, this series of events was not, in fact, a planned marketing stunt, and Hatch is still figuring out the ramifications of the demon discourse. While Merani is glad the ads and programming “caught people’s attention,” she wants to clarify they were all meant for fun, and she’s heartened by how many users have rushed in to defend Hatch.

“We saw a lot of community jumping into the comments and saying, ‘Wait a minute, we missed the plot here!'” she says. “This is a Halloween-themed ad about their adult—not baby—product actually being the thing that will save you from the real evil: your phone. Your phone is actually keeping you up at night.’” To be clear, Hatch makes two devices, one specifically for kids and the other for adults. Any pop culture references, like Twilight, are exclusive to adults only via Hatch’s Restore 2 and 3 devices—they can’t be accessed on the Hatch Baby.

Then, a new trending topic arose about 48 hours later: “If you’re going to throw your Hatch device away, send it to me.”

Hatch took it and ran with it. “We used the cues of the community and sort of rode that wave with this idea of, ‘Hey, we know this is happening, and we wanted to address this while also pointing at having a little bit of fun with it,” Merani says.

Enter Hatch’s new “RePossession Program.” “We saw this overwhelming outreach of people who wanted to be ‘repossessed,'” Merani says, “so we were able to point people to our refurbishment program, to be able to keep those devices out of landfills and send ‘repossessed’ units out.”

So far, Hatch has had more than 10,000 related social media inquiries about receiving “repossessed Hatch devices,” and only 10 requests to send Hatch devices back to the company.

Ultimately, if you have a Hatch device and would like to send it back, you can contact customer service to arrange a return. On the other hand, you can now purchase refurbished machines (from the repossessed campaign and otherwise) here. No matter what side of the conversation you find yourself on, we can all agree on one thing: sleep is important, and you should definitely spend less time on your phone.