In December 2025, five Canterbury gardeners bought Kiwicare Weed Weapon, used it in their own gardens, and filmed what happened.
That is the whole campaign. It is also the clearest New Zealand evidence theSalt has about what customer content does when it is put up against a brand's own advertising, and it is worth walking through properly because the figures need to be read in context.
Why five people
Because the brief called for depth rather than volume.
Garden treatment is a category of specific problems. Nobody buys weed spray in general. They buy it because of the stuff coming up through the cracks, and what they want to know is whether it works on that, in this climate, at this time of year.
Answering that takes a gardener showing a real problem and then showing what happened to it several days later. Five people doing that properly is worth more than fifty people holding a bottle.
What the comparison shows
The useful comparison is with Kiwicare's own advertising during the campaign.
The customer content ran as paid media during the same campaign period as Kiwicare's own paid advertising. That puts the comparison in the local campaign, rather than against a category benchmark or a result from another market.
It shows how the customer content performed alongside the brand's ads. It does not establish that who made the content was the sole cause of the difference.
The numbers
- 2.78% click-through on customer content, against 1.07% on the brand's own paid ads in the same campaign.
- 4,937 paid clicks, at NZ$0.20 each.
- A reported 88% of campaign reach was in the 25 to 54 age band.
- 5 real gardeners, with every piece of content owned by the brand.
Source: Kiwicare Campaign Report, January 2026.
Reading the click-through figure honestly
2.78% against 1.07% is roughly two and a half times, on one campaign, in one category, in one market, with five participants. It is not a law of nature and we do not present it as one.
Running during the same campaign period makes the result useful to the brand. It does not rule out differences in timing or targeting, so the figures need to be read as a campaign comparison.
Reading the cost per click
The campaign reported an average paid cost per click of NZ$0.20.
The customer ads recorded 2.78% click-through and an average NZ$0.20 cost per click. The brand ads recorded 1.07% click-through. Without a cost-per-click figure for the brand ads, those results do not tell us how their distribution costs compared.
Reading the reach figure
The reported 88% describes the age mix of campaign reach: the share in the 25 to 54 band. It does not mean the campaign reached 88% of everyone in that age group.
For a garden brand it is a useful band. Kiwicare products are sold through more than 2,500 retail locations in New Zealand, including Mitre 10, Bunnings, PlaceMakers and grocery, so the shopper is broad and the audience needed to be.
What the campaign did not prove
Worth stating plainly, because the omissions are the reason the rest can be trusted.
The available report does not present retail sales lift, a test of participant count, or an analysis of creative fatigue.
Those questions need further evidence before we can answer them.
Why we keep pointing at it
Because it happened here. A category manager in Auckland has been shown a great many Australian and American case studies, and discounts them correctly, because the retail structure and the shopper are different.
One local campaign with counts attached carries more weight in that room than a global deck. It is also, deliberately, a small campaign with an unglamorous product and a modest participant count, which is roughly what a first pilot looks like for most brands.
What we would do differently next time
Build the retail read in from the start. The paid comparison is strong and it stops one step short of the question a trading meeting actually asks, which is what happened to units.
That is what the retail sales lift page sets out, and the category detail is on garden and outdoor.