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.

Next has over 500 stores all over U.K. and Ireland as well as around 50 franchise stores all over Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. With this kind of popularity, it should not come as a shock to anyone that they would be attracting a lot of attention for their baby competition. Next offered about 500 pounds worth of Next vouchers, an 12-month exclusive modeling contract with Urban Angels agency and an exclusive photo shoot for Next in collaboration with Prima Baby 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.

Parents started to act very aggressively online just to get votes in favor of their little bundle of joy. Some parents even started creating YouTube videos featuring their babies in order to garner more attention. Parents started going against each other and it even reached a point wherein they were actually sending and receiving hate mails from their fellow participants.

It also did not help when Next had to issue a public apology to a mother whose entry they rejected because of her baby’s huge birthmark on the face. It wasn’t so much anymore of a logistical problem, now Next was faced with a case of discrimination to babies.

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 healthy competition showcasing babies’ natural charms. However, it seems that the “beauty pageant attitude” carried on to this competition as well and it did not turn out as expected.

Next had the best intentions going into creating this competition and there isn’t anything wrong with baby competitions as well. Perhaps next time, they should be more aware of how successful or how much disaster they may encounter and be more prepared.

Would you like to enter your child right into a baby photo contest ? Now you can do it all on the web extremely effortlessly, there are tones of baby modeling contest on-line that you could enter in minutes.