Boobs in advertising

The Forgotten Ps of Marketing: A Dating Analogy

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 20:41:41 GMT

To get someone’s attention your dating profile needs to look and sound HOT. You need to know which of your attributes are going to work best to attract your target mate. To start a conversation. To talk to them in the right tone. To get to know them and build emotional connection, before you suggest a meet-up.

When it comes to the 4Ps - your dating profile is all about Promotion (marketing comms) and Product (what you're buying). But getting them on that first date - that's all about the right Place and the right Price.

When it comes to the 4Ps of marketing, Price and Place are often overlooked. Heck, they're often not even considered within the remit of the marketing team for many businesses. And yet these levers are a vital part of the marketing strategy framework and are not to be underestimated in terms of their power to take your brand from good to great.

Here are 6 tips to going from hot dating profile with your customer to developing a long-lasting relationship!

1. Don't message bomb then ghost.

Being stood-up is a lousy feeling so don't do it to your potential customers. Don’t blow money on a big comms campaign unless your brand is where your consumers want to buy. If there's a gap in your customer journey, your potential customers will fall into it - and perhaps even into the arms of another. You'll have done the hard work only for someone else to gain all the benefit.

At the risk of sounding a bit stalkerish, ‘turn up’ in multiple places where they happen to be and are most likely to be in the right frame of mind, so they have multiple chances to pick you up. They may even start to think it’s ‘fate’ you should be together.

Use tools like cross-promotions to get dual sitings in physical stores/online ( The Happy Egg Company has done this with Warburton's ).
Counter-top and free standing display units or shippers (examples below) can get you great standout and also make you available to pick up in more than one place.
Programmatic ads can help you show up for people who have already browsed your brand are ready to buy.
Ensure stock availability is also good before you launch your comms. Shippers can help address this by making sure you are ‘well stocked’ in a number of locations.

2. Show up looking even better than your profile pic

Be easily recognisable. It’s all about working those ‘distinctive assets’ (logos, colours, shapes, sounds specific to you) – wear them loud and proud across all your marketing touch points.

Stand out against the competition – you might have looked hot on your tinder profile but if you agreed to meet up at the gym are you drowned out by finer specimens? Packaging can look great in isolation, but how does it actually fair on-shelf, on an online market, or on a comparison website? Does your colour and style stand-out? If not, use the tools at your disposal to enhance your look in the place you'll be seen (shelf-ready packaging, digital ads, lifestyle images, logos, fonts, straplines and so on).

Arrive on your date impeccably dressed. Check the quality of your packaging material - is it fit for purpose, did you do transport trials? Because no one buys the dented can of beans or dog-eared pack because they worry the product will be damaged or substandard.

And not just impeccably dressed, but sartorially correct. Right place, right pack! Are you harnessing your product and place combo to best effect? Don't just let your sales team get whatever product they can listed in whichever retailer, or put all your products onto the same online market place - think about which products are best suited to which distribution channels and do the work to maximise and enhance.

3. Keep your options open

Whilst searching for the perfect partner, don’t be afraid to use a variety of dating apps. 70% of people go to Amazon at least once per month. Also platforms like Etsy and Notonthehighstreet. Fish where there are plenty of fish! Consider limited ranges in these places where people are literally searching for products like yours rather than trying to bring people to you at your own site or limited distribution outlets.

All’s fair in love - 70% of brand choice decisions are made at point of purchase. Find out or make an educated guess as to when your big competitors are going to be advertising. They are doing the work to bring people to your category or market. Usurp! Be there, stand out, look better. Have shopper comms running, pack promotions, strong search, so you are coming up first/alongside them. You may not be the brand they originally came to meet but you might be the one they go home with.

4. Know your worth and act accordingly

Price to reflect your worth - if you go low hoping for a bunch of one night stands to get you started, know that it's hard to roll back from that - people won’t want to pay your full price (looking at you Pizza Express). Equally don’t go so high you feel out of reach for your perfect match.

You can really understand your pricing dynamics by investing in price elasticity modelling or simulated shelf testing (so you can see how consumers react to and perceive the value of your product at different prices relative to competition).

If that's out of your budget range, conduct a simple consumer survey using the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Model . Or at the least do a comprehensive review of all your competitors' prices across different retailers, understand who your closest competitors are in terms of value perception and price relatively to reflect your respective quality.

5. Do you have shared values – can you grow together?

For a date to turn into a relationship you need to fit in each-other's lives and find common goals and values. Getting into your perfect distribution channel is a bit like that.

Too many brands march into a retailer demanding where they want to be and what they want to get out of it. Remember, you are moving into their place, where they have been a long time and have some strict house rules and other house guests.

Go in very clear on the value you are adding and mutual fit and benefit of you being there. Pricing strategy is critical to demonstrating how you will do that. If you are adding value by upgrading people from a less worthy opponent, your pricing needs to reflect that.

If you go in with a lower price than your competitors, you need to show you will bring new consumers into the category or encourage people there to buy more frequently and show you will make the buyer more money vs just move around or downgrading current sales.

It needs to be mutually viable. Understand the margins that retailers, wholesalers and market places expect. You also need to be making money from the start – don’t go too low to ‘get a foot in the door’ – you are unlikely to get a price increase later.

6. A bit of ‘wooing’ is great in the beginning but long-term relationships are built on more

Sometimes consumers need a bit of wooing to try a new brand for the first time. Promotions (not the comms kind - the sales ones) are a critical part of pricing strategy and brand growth. Particularly in terms of driving trial or (depending on your industry) to help you manage commodity prices, seasonality and general steady volume.

However, make sure you:

Are really clear on your promotional objectives and use the right mechanics to reflect them (for example, shallow temporary price reductions (TPRs) can help to drive trial with your target audience vs multi-buy to ‘lock-in’ previous buyers or drive volume to a seasonal need).
Keep price promotions relative to your price hierarchy. Look at what your competitors promote at. Ensure your promotions are relative. Understand what is ‘too low’ and will damage value perception – don’t go there.
Don’t get hooked– excessive promotion damages brand equity and will make you commercially unviable. Want to investigate this more - here are some interesting case studies:
Tyrrell's Drug of Promotion
Les Binet on Price Promotions in a Recession

Ready to swipe right and make better use of your forgotten Ps to attract your growth audience? Get in touch and we'll tell you how we can help. And if you're not quite ready to make a first date, you can find our HOT profile here!

And if you've enjoyed our slightly tongue-in-cheek gallop through the forgotten Ps of marketing, you'll definitely enjoy this one - it's about Boobs!

3 Steps To Successful Packaging Redesign

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 10:27:45 GMT

In our last blog , we asked you to carefully consider before embarking on a brand or packaging redesign. If you've established your objectives, and it's time to get going, here are three steps to ensure your redesign is a success.

STEP 1. Plan your pre-launch research and concept testing.

As part of the decision to undertake a redesign, you should already have carried out consumer and competitor research to understand the problem you want to fix. Know where your current design works and where it doesn't in terms of consumer appeal, distinctiveness, how recognisable it is and how well it communicates the brand's positioning.

Once a project is embarked on, it can be tempting to go with your gut feel, or worse, allow design by committee to decide on the final outcome. Your professional judgement is important and is best articulated through having a clear framework for what the design needs to achieve (which comes from having a clear brief - see Step 3).

But, redesigns can cost thousands both directly on the design itself and indirectly on packaging run-out costs, updating all your brand collateral, and even in lost revenue if you don't get it right. So, consider running your designs by consumers before forging ahead.

Check that the brand is still recognisable and distinctive and solicit feedback that will help you decide if the problems you set out to fix have been attended to. It's not about letting the consumer choose the design for you, it's about checking that you're on the right track, so it's important to plan this research into the process at a stage where changes can still be made.

Research can cost anything from a few thousand pounds upwards, but investment made at this stage can save significant cost later down the line.

You should also try to see how your proposed new design will look in the retail space. A design can look fabulous on paper, but when viewed in 3-D, next to your competitors, it can fail to stand out. This is where a friendly retail account can help - swapping out your existing design for mock-ups to photograph.

STEP 2 Protect what is distinctively recognisable

Consumers look for shapes and colours as short cuts to the brands they usually buy or want. Understand the key distinctive visual assets and codes of your brand and don’t change them unless you have a clear and considered reason to do so.

The disastrous rebrand of Tropicana lost them $20m in a month and was ultimately pulled before the brand went back to its previous design.

The new design may well have delivered on the brief of showing freshly squeezed orange juice, but it's not what consumers were looking for when shopping in-store. The design rolled-back so significantly on the brand's distinctive logo and other brand signifiers, that it was missed or mistaken for an own label product.

You do need to keep your brand fresh and relevant but not at the expense of being recognisable. Lurpak has done a great job of tweaking their branding over the years, but it’s so slow and slight each time and the baby has not been thrown out with the proverbial bathwater. They have ‘crown jewels’ (silver and blue) and once they were introduced in the 90s, have only very slightly tweaked the logo, horns and ‘swoosh’.

You can see how the pack has evolved over the years in these ads from the 80s to early 2000s and below, how it looks now - simple, elegant and instantly recognisable.

STEP 3 Do a proper brief

Too many marketers and business owners expect their design agency to write their brand strategy for them. They send a brief which is a set of questions instead of a set of decisions.

Creative agencies may well have strategists but they are creative strategists. Packaging and design agencies often have people with similar titles, but again, their focus is on the specific area of expertise - they cannot and should not make the decisions about what your brand stands for and how it is positioned in the market.

A good brief will clearly and succinctly articulate the decisions you have made about who, or what needs you are targeting in the market and how your brand is positioned in relation to the target audience and your competitors.

It should articulate what you want to stand for and how you want to be seen by consumers.

Your agency's job is to figure out how to turn your brief into distinctive, compelling and memorable design in a way that will illicit the perception and feelings you are targeting.

Remember – clients usually get the work their briefs deserve. So put the proper time and effort into your brief and the insight and strategic thinking it requires.

If you don't have a briefing template, email us and we'll send you one that can be used to brief brand and packaging design.

Your brief also serves as the framework for assessing design. It's important that you 'like' a design but it's also important to assess it with a degree of impartiality and this is where testing early concepts with consumers can help.

Whatever your marketing challenge, from tactical questions such as creative comms and packaging redesigns, to the bigger questions like finding growth audiences and brand positioning, we can help.

As a Marketing Insight & Strategy Business, Atalante helps you to articulate and make the decisions you need to make to create a distinctive and memorable brand that drives business growth.

If you need help with research, creative testing, proposition and brief development for your packaging or brand design, or even on the big questions you need to answer before you embark on such a project, get in touch and we'll explore your challenge together.

Why, why, why redesign your packaging? The questions to ask and answer before you brief!

Fri, 19 May 2023 16:29:17 GMT

“We need to re-fresh the brand!"

How many times has a new brand manager heard that on their first day and then diligently set about seeing how much of an impact and ‘difference’ they can make?

But consistency reigns in branding - it’s literally what brand means:

Brand: An identifying mark

If you really want to earn your wings as a marketer, what you should be asking is 'why?'. Why would we re-design our packaging?

Before you embark on what, at best will be a costly venture and at worst an entirely misguided one, here 4 key questions to ask yourself or the person that's instigating the design change. Answering these before you start may result in you not starting the process at all or in a better brief when you do.

1. Has your brand become wallpaper?

In other words, is it failing to stand-out on shelf, on a direct-to-consumer website or at the bar (or wherever your brand is most frequently sited?

Why is this happening and how do you know? Is it a straw poll of one or have you had real and relevant feedback from customers and consumers?

Packaging and branding is all about context. It’s not about how it looks on the board room table, it’s about how it stands out in the context your consumers will be choosing it. For example, there are few brands that in an office setting would choose to go with grey, but it's worked wonders for Lurpak in setting it apart in a sea of buttery yellow.

Ask yourself:

What specifically is making the brand fail to stand out? Do all the other brands have similar colours, images, fonts or pack formats? Is the main colour duller than others in the market? Are the text or logo too small? Is the pack too busy. Which brands are doing a good job and why? Think iconic Coca-Cola bottle!
What are the category codes that consumers need and use that you can’t play with? For example, in the milk category, green means semi-skimmed, blue means whole milk. Generally, flavour colour codes are something all brands need to adhere to or you are creating work and confusion for customers. You can stand against the norm or change it (as Walkers Crisps did when they switched blue and green around) but understand why you're doing it and how it helps both the brand and consumers. Branding is about helping people make quick, easy decisions - not irritating them by making them think and work!

2. Has your brand lost relevance with your target audience?

If you believe this to be the case, how do you know it to be true? Are you seeing a decline in sales and have you researched why that might be the case?

A few points to reflect on here:

Are you actually clear on who your audience is and what they want and need to hear and see from you? Where are the gaps between this and your current packaging?
Have you understood why your brand has lost relevance overall? How much of it is just the visuals coming across as old-fashioned and how much is it an underlying issue with the product or proposition? Trying to solve the latter through a pack redesign simply won't work.
What is still relevant and important to your audience? What do they care about, notice and remember about your packaging? What do you need to protect what makes the brand and its products recognisable and appealing?

3. Are you trying to broaden your audience or appeal to a different audience altogether?

Packaging redesigns and other positioning strategies and tactical executions can serve to help you find new audiences for your brand. Is this at the route of your redesign plans? If so, think about:

Who are you trying to appeal to and why the move? How quickly do you want to make that change (looking at the early 2023 Bud Light saga , we’d always advocate looking at how you can broaden and/or slowly ‘shift’ appeal vs abandon and alienate a core customer unless you want to and are prepared for a short-term sales nose dive)
Where are the commonalities between your existing and growth audience needs that you can tap into to ‘take people with you’ ? Where are the appeal sweet spots?
What are the differences between your existing and growth audiences that the packaging needs to neutralise or avoid?

4. Are you trying to change what meaning and associations your brand stands for in people’s minds?

Packaging and brand redesigns are perfectly legitimate if you're looking to remove bad or unhelpful brand associations (think Burberry check and the ‘chav’). But they are equally valid if you're trying to add new or different associations to tap into a positive. For example, Dove used to just be about softer, smoother skin. Now it’s much more than that – and their healthy beauty positioning has become embedded into their brand look and feel.

Again, there are a few more things to consider:

Be very clear on where you are in terms of what your brand stands for and its associations – what does it mean to people now? Where do you want it to go? What specific associations are you keeping and what are you changing? This really should be based on brand imaging research.
Who's going to love what you do and who's going to hate it? You don’t want to be 'meh' to everyone – give a design an attitude to speak to and one to push against if you want distinctive work.
Is packaging the first thing you are doing on this journey? If so turn around and go back to go now. Packaging has limitations. If you are changing brand meaning that's top level, holistic strategy. For it to land, your culture, product, advertising and comms will all have to change. They are the things that imbue meaning. Packaging only reflects this.

This 4 point check list with it's numerous whys and wherefores might feel hefty.

The point is – make sure you ask and answer some deep questions before you even agree to a pack re-design. And then remember it is your job (not your agency's) to have done the insight and strategy work and answer these questions for the brief - rather than leaving them for your agency to guess at or solve for you. This gives them focus and direction on the problem the creative idea and design need to solve. Plus, it gives you a clear framework against which the work can be evaluated.

Atalante is a Marketing Insight & Strategy business. We can help with packaging and audience insight, creative testing and agency briefing. Get in touch to discuss your packaging and brand redesign challenge and we'll help you figure out where to start.

Read more here on assessing your marketing strategy.

Powerful & Persuasive Pitch Decks to Secure Your Retailer Listing

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 16:16:47 GMT

Even if you make your retailer or stockist presentation the most entertaining ever, the best you can hope for is that only two thirds will be remembered!

That’s at best. At worst, research such as that carried out by John Medina, in his book Brain Rules , suggests it can be as little as 10%. According to presented.co.uk audiences remember 50% of what’s said in any given presentation. By the next day, they only remember 25%.

So how do you ensure your retailer pitch is memorable, powerful and persuasive?

The best presentations harness the power of a good story.

We've been telling stories since time began. A good story carries the audience along. And stories are remembered differently from stats and data. When we tell a story, when we paint a picture for our audience, our message is much more likely to be remembered.

Your pitch deck is like a good story.

All good stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. Picture the scene.... we're in a Grimm's fairy tale that opens on a scene of terrified villagers plagued by a fire-breathing dragon. The story draws us in; perhaps the spotlight is cast on a child whose father has been carried off by the dragon. Then, we’re introduced to the plucky heroine; we hear snippets of her personal story and how she came to be a mighty dragon slayer. There's a fierce battle before finally the dragon is slayed, the heroine thanked and the villagers live happily ever after.

So far, so far-fetched. Now to turn it into something you can actually present to a prospective retailer or stockist. Here's how...

Start with the problem

If your presentation and sell-in decks start with you - time to take note. Your brand is the plucky heroine – she doesn’t make an entrance until you’ve created the danger and made it personal.

Substitute our beleaguered villages for consumers and start by outlining the problem your brand solves.

If you have a clear brand strategy - you know who your consumers are and you've positioned your brand to meet those needs, you'll be able to articulate the problem, gap, needs, or opportunity at the heart of your story.

Ideally, you should have your own insight and data to demonstrate what you know to be true. And not just true, but sizable and of importance. Who are the consumers that have the identified need? How is their need manifested? What are they looking for in relation to the need and how is the need triggered?

If you can’t start with a need, or problem or opportunity that has teeth and is real and measurable, then you're not ready to start selling in your brand or product. If you can, open your presentation here.

Demonstrate relevance for your audience

You’ve started strongly, showing how the problem or gap matters to consumers. Now it’s time to make it relevant and of importance to your audience.

We're substituting the child in our story with the retailer or stockist and we're demonstrating how the consumer problem, need, gap or opportunity plays out in their stores or business model.

What are they missing? Are they being out-paced by competitors, or is fulfilling this need for consumers going to help them out-pace others? Will it help the retailer or stockist become a destination of choice for a particular consumer group? Does it relate to an objective or mission that they've outlined for the category? Or even more generally - does it help them achieve steps towards longer-term strategies?

As well as doing the standard data analysis (looking at sales and category data if you have it), brush-up on what matters to your retailer and therefore to the buyer you're speaking to. Has the retailer been in the news - if so, how is it relevant? What's hot and what's not for them at the moment?

Visit their stores, their website, read relevant reviews. And if you can, speak to the buyer before you pitch. Find out what they're currently working on? What are they looking to see? What challenges are they facing?

Play back what you discover – every presentation and pitch deck should be personalised to your audience - there're no one-size-fits-all when it comes to seeking to gain a listing.

Show how your brand meets a consumer need

Your brand is the heroine of our story – here to save the day! Be choiceful. Your buyer doesn’t need to know everything about the her back story – just the bits that matter. Her raison d’etre – her fire in the belly.

Show how your brand responds to the needs that you’ve identified and how you do that differently from other brands.

Take a few slides to introduce your brand/product:

- Convey your positioning in the market.

- Show how your brand/product fulfils the need that you’ve identified.

- Be clear about who your consumers are, who you're targeting with your proposition

Articulate the size of the prize

This is the start of your happy ending! When you demonstrate the potential for the retailer:

Be clear about exactly what you’re recommending – which products and why, where you see them sitting on the fixture.
If you’ve got access to the retailer’s data or some approximation of the data; if you’ve got some wider market context, you can show how big an opportunity for them this proposition is. You need to make a strong category argument – any proposal that depletes category margin is unlikely to be of interest. You need to show how you:

Bring new consumers to the category that aren’t currently shopping there – ideally from the category shoppers of another retailer.
Or how you deliver additional purchase occasions such as delivering on the breakfast occasion not just lunch or snack.
You might show how you increase purchase frequency or weight of purchase – the sorts of metrics that your retailer is looking to achieve.
Always show your working out in the appendices – how do you get to that size of prize?

If you don’t have retailer specific data, you can use your own sales out data to create a model of what it could look like in the retailer you’re speaking to. Can you show how having your brand in Retailer X has grown category sales year on year, for example, or you could hypothesise the outcomes based on certain assumptions?

No data? Go back to first principles

We know that it can be tough for small, scaling brands and start-ups to be able to invest in retail data. So, if you don't have any useful data to speak of, go back to first principles and reflect on the problem through the eyes of your audience:

- What retailers are fulfilling the need for consumers that your retailer isn’t? How are they doing that?

- Can you show a model of what good looks like – for example, instore images from other retailers?

- And show how your retailer doesn’t have the need fulfilled

- Is there any relevant online traffic/search for the need your brand meets, for example on Amazon or Google Trends?

- Could you show how other categories in the retailer’s store are fulfilling the need, but this category isn’t (for example – a retailer that is clearly catering for sensitive skin in one category but not in yours)?

- Can you replay anything from the retailer’s mission, objectives, or initiatives? For example, does your proposition meet a particular objective that the retailer is on a mission to fulfil such as inclusion or environmental objectives?

Follow-up in an action-oriented way

Your presentation is only the start of the story. The ideal next-step is for you to be able to submit a full commercial proposal, samples, product information, and so on.

Your hard copy or pdf of your presentation should include:

- A summary of your pitch – the consumer problem, the proposed solution.

- Why it’s of importance to your buyer – the size of the prize with the data to back your thinking

- Your clear recommendation/ask

- Any additional reading material that they might find of interest – more detail of your primary or third-party research, more information about your brand (such as reviews and recommendations), images from instore.

- And how/when you will follow-up with them

If you're stuck with your story, we can help. In managing brands large and small, we've written dozens of presentations that have helped to successfully land commercial objectives with retailers. We can turn your insight and strategy into a meaningful and personalised retailer or stockist pitch to help achieve your goals.

We can start by doing a quick review of your existing deck. Email us at hello@atalantemarketing .

Let's slay some dragons!

To be different or be distinctive? That is the question!

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 15:27:50 GMT

Should our brand be differentiated or distinctive? It’s a question we often get asked. And if we don’t, we ask it. Are you different from your competitors or are you distinctive? They’re not the same thing. We explore the differences between the idea of a USP or unique selling proposition, differentiation and distinctiveness.

Where you focus as a brand will depend entirely on the market you’re in, who you’re targeting and where you are in your journey.

The Unique Selling Proposition

Many businesses start because they have an idea for a way of doing things that’s different. Unique selling propositions (or USPs) disrupt markets in favour of the new entrant (think Airbnb), attract funding (think Uber) and can pave the way to being first in an emerging market (think Tesla).

The idea of the USP goes back to the 1940s when Rosser Reeves of the ad agency Ted Bates & Company first coined the phrase.

What many businesses, especially small and scaling businesses, often forget is that it’s not the uniqueness that matters it’s the selling proposition part. Uniqueness isn’t necessarily a desirable end in and of itself. It needs to be real, not just an unsubstantiated claim or clever word play; it needs to be something that consumers are prepared to pay for (i.e., that it meets a need); and it needs to be a proposition that’s desirable to enough people to make it scalable.

If you know (through market research) that you have a true USP then it would serve your brand well to consider how you will capitalise on it in the short-term, but also what your long-term strategy will be when your USP is copied (as it inevitably will be if it’s successful).

Differentiation or Differentiated Associations

So, now you have a product or service with a USP. What next? The undeniable truth for most brands and businesses is that USPs for the most part can be copied by competitors. Even patented USPs can be superseded or circumvented. You may build your early success on a USP but it’s unlikely to be sustainable in the long-term.

The early pioneers of differentiation, those like Theodore Levitt of the Harvard Business School who said that “differentiation is one of the most important strategic and tactical activities in which companies must constantly engage” have given way to a more nuanced idea of differentiation.

Differentiated associations, in other words relentlessly focusing on owning a differentiated space so that, even though competitors may copy it, your brand still comes to mind first, is the space beyond a non-defendable USP that businesses often look to.

Volvo is the perfect example. For decades, Volvo cars were empirically the safest on the roads. Once a USP, now it’s a differentiated association that they have relentlessly pursued – it lives in their brand DNA. In fact, so important is safety to them as a business that they have given access to their safety inventions to improve car manufacturing in general.

Volvo can’t necessarily objectively demonstrate that they are the safest, but they are certainly still most likely to be associated with that attribute and it’s a mission that drives the way they develop their cars.

Brands that are successful at establishing differentiated associations convince consumers that their offer is significantly different from that of their competitors. Volvo’s example is closer to a USP because they invest in the continuing advancement of safety over and above their competitors. But safety in cars is not a unique idea in and of itself.

For other brands, their differentiated association may be less objective and more subjective. Coca-Cola, for example, is always there when you’re thirsty. It’s not that they are objectively any more thirst-quenching than other liquids, just that they relentlessly focus on ’owning’ that space.

A differentiated association, the idea of a brand being ‘more’ of something than its competitors, is more sustainable than a USP which is here today, gone tomorrow.

Brand Distinctiveness

Brand differentiation ruled for decades but then came the work from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute , dispelling many of the theories that had built-up around the idea of ‘differentiate or die’. They demonstrated that in most categories, the idea of differentiation does exist between brands but only in a very weak form. Byron Sharp acknowledges in his book How Brands Grow that differentiation must exist in order for us to tell one brand from another but that consumers don’t perceive brands in any given category to be that different from one another.

Thus distinctiveness. Distinctiveness is when a brand persistently and consistently looks like itself. It invests in recognisable brand codes that consumers simply can’t miss. Those brand codes trace memory tracks in our brain (that’s not quite how it works, but you know what we mean) so that those with the widest, deepest tracks are the ones most likely to come to mind in a buying situation.

Distinctive brand assets can be everything from a logo and colour to a sound or aroma. Many are underrated but when well developed and used consistently can be every bit as strong as the logo itself. Think the ‘we buy any car dot com’ jingle or the McDonald’s whistle, the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle or the Compare The Market characters and their accents.

The desire, especially for scaling brands, to ‘rebrand’, change their logos, pick a new core colour and so on, can be strong. Those investing well in their distinctive assets should take a long-term view around any planned changes – evolution not revolution. Investing in distinctiveness, making sure your consumers know and recognise you, has a greater correlation with sustained brand growth than differentiation.

Differentiation And Distinctiveness

Ultimately though, we’re not great fans of the ‘either/or’ approach. We believe that even small brands can stand for something and build distinctiveness. When we start working with a new client, we often look to the origins of the brand, to any existing research, to how the brand is currently perceived in the market to find a more ‘ownable’ articulation of meaningful differentiation.

Being more of something than your competitors is a viable strategy, even for small brands. For JuiceBurst it was around healthy refreshment, for Walton & Co it’s about creating the feel of your home, for Quintessential , differentiation comes through the founder’s take on flavour blending and for Muto it’s about the idea that everyone has a different take on what fitness means to them.

To find a successful positioning for your brand you must be choiceful but not exclusionary. Focus on associating the brand with one or two key attributes (differentiated association) – the things you want your brand to be ‘more of’ than its competitors. Find distinctive ways of telling people about your brand – a distinctive look, tone of voice, strapline or story and use them as the lens for your marketing executions.

To find what makes you different or distinctive, contact us today.

3 ways to find new growth through your target audience

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 12:33:10 GMT

Have you hit a growth ceiling? Do you feel you’ve saturated your current market and need to find new avenues for growth? Are you leaving value potential on the table? Here are three ways to re-evaluate your existing audience and refine, reset or pivot your marketing strategy.

1️⃣ Have you segmented and targeted your audience by needs and mindsets or are you still using demographics?

When we started our project with the team at JuiceBurst, they’d already nailed their proposition for 14-20 year-olds. As a brand approved by schools, they had a comprehensive positioning strategy (see our JuiceBurst case study).

But that’s quite a specific market to be in, so how do you scale? Instead of looking at a different demographic, we looked first to understand why these consumers liked and bought the brand. What needs JuiceBurst fulfilled for them better than its competitors.

Unearthing the space where physical needs meet emotional needs – for JuiceBurst, this was all about the vibrant taste hit for those seeking a refreshing lift to their palette and mood – gives you a starting point to look to where else, and for whom, that need is not met.

Needs-based or mindset audiences are different from demographic audiences. And what’s more, they are usually considerably larger than demographic audiences. These audiences are united around similar needs, beliefs, passions and mindsets.

For JuiceBurst, identifying its mindset audience meant no new products were required and no costly rebrand. Instead, the team switched its focus to leveraging its 4 Ps more broadly to tap into those needs – from new distribution in on-the-go moments to a creative campaign aimed at a broader, mindset audience.

Where to start: how do you articulate your target audience? Do you understand the needs that your brand fulfils? What are the mindsets that drive consumers in your category? If you don’t know – it’s time to find out.

2️⃣ What does it look like if you flip or ditch the 80:20 rule?

For many brands and businesses, especially those with a face-to-face or direct-to-consumer element, it’s easy to assume that growth is dependent on finding and maintaining heavy, loyal customers. We often refer to this as the 80:20 rule – 80% of your sales coming from 20% of your customers. Closer scrutiny usually reveals this to be a myth.

As the marketing director and brand manager for the famous Bettys in North Yorkshire, we found that so many of the service staff recognised and could name their most frequent visitors.

These very loyal customers are important in many ways – they are often ambassadors and advocates for your brand, they are a good place to start for any research because they can articulate what they love about your brand from a consumer perspective and they are the canary in the coalmine when things go wrong.

But, when we ran a big survey across a 3-month period to understand exactly who was visiting Bettys café tearooms and shops, what we discovered was that the 80:20 rule just didn’t apply. As much research in the field demonstrates* the vast majority of any brand’s sales (especially those in FMCG) comes from ‘light’ buyers. Those who buy the brand occasionally. We discovered that this was true of Bettys – the unknown, rarely seen visitors who were tending to come once or twice a year, or even for the first time, were spending significantly more than those who visited regularly.

So, we asked 'what if'? What if our menus, shop products, communications and staff training were designed around someone visiting Bettys for the first time? What if, instead of relying on word of mouth in the local area, we aimed to make Bettys a first-stop destination for visitors to Yorkshire? What if those who had visited from further afield could still buy a bit of Bettys to enjoy at home?

By flipping our focus, it gave us the permission to develop the Bettys proposition beyond its Yorkshire heartland. From Bettys By Post to bookable afternoon teas (a guaranteed slot without the queues!), from staff training designed to help new visitors feel at home to feedback and data capture forms.

Where to start: articulate what you are doing to focus on those that only occasionally interact with your category. Are you focusing on who those people might be, where they might be and what they might need to hear from you to ensure your brand is top-of-mind when they arrive?

3️⃣ Look to the future whilst solving for today

Lego is a great example of a brand that has reframed how it looks at its heartland audience rather than being distracted by finding new audiences.

Sometimes, when brands try to scale and go after a new market they completely alienate their current audience (think 'Not Your Mother's Tiffany' – an initiative by Tiffany’s designed to focus on a younger audience).

When Lego hit a brick wall (no pun intended), it didn’t do a Hornby and refocus on adults as a nostalgia proposition, it focused on finding a way to stay relevant to its core audience without changing who that audience is.

Logo’s play promise – “play is vital to every child's development. When children play, they learn to solve problems, to be creative, and to become resilient. It helps them thrive in a complex and challenging world" – helped them to stay pinpoint focused on their audience.

Whilst they understood and set their strategy around immutable mindsets and attitudes – that children learn through play – they also recognised that the social context for today’s children is different from those of yesterday.

Lego is still Lego, but each generation’s memories will be different. For us, it’s the brightly coloured building blocks that required a bit of imagination to create fields of horses, houses with cars, spaceships and planes. For today’s children it’s about the Marvel universe and piñata parties.

The brand has also looked at what else it could do that delivers on its promise. From video games, events and theme parks to buildable robots and more, each launch is entirely consistent with the brand allowing it to scale whilst staying relevant to each generation of children.

Where to start: is your brand trying to be all things to all people? It may feel counterintuitive but getting hyper focused on your target audience (providing you have an understanding of their needs and attitudes and not just their demographics) may help you identify new opportunities to deliver on your brand promise.

*Byron Sharp in research for his book How Brands Grow is a strong advocate for finding growth through ultra-light buyers in the category. Read more here

Brand Positioning For Healthy Products

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 18:56:09 GMT

If your brand is positioned around a healthy proposition, the start of a new year may well be the perfect time to get your message heard. But 'better for you' products face a real challenge around perceptions of taste that can challenge even the most seasoned of marketers.

There's so much research out there that points to much the same thing - products that communicate nutrition claims have increased expectations of healthiness but decreased perceptions of taste. In just one example, a study that compared taste expectations of chicken soup based on front-of-pack communications, showed that consumers expected the product labelled as 'lower salt' to be less tasty*.

For every food brand we've worked with, taste usually appears in the top three purchase drivers. It's a finding that itself should be taken with a pinch of salt - not least because taste is so subjective. How we experience taste depends on many physical factors such as our age, our sense of smell, whether we have a cold or other illness, or the physical characteristics of the food such as its viscosity or the temperature it's eaten at.

Taste and expectations of taste are also different things. Irrespective of actual flavour delivery, we generally expect those foods for which we feel we're making a compromise to be less tasty than the no-compromise alternative. For most food categories, the 'better for you' option is expected to be less tasty than its 'full fat' counterpart.

So, if the expectation already exists, how do 'better for you' products overcome the purchase intent barrier that lower taste expectations create?

Here are just some of the ways we've seen brands tackling this issue:

Appetite appeal
Borrow from the language of indulgence. Halo Top Ice Creams don't give the impression that there's any compromise in their products - in fact, their ice cream tubs look every bit as indulgent as Haagen Daz. Yet, at around half the calorific content of their competitors, they are occupying a 'better for you' positioning within the market.
Fuel expectations
The words we use to describe foods on packaging and in comms, establish consumer expectations of taste. The superbly named Simply Roasted crisps (after all, who doesn't love a roast potato?) are described as triple cooked for a crunchier crisp. Again, they can boast 50% less fat than standard counterparts yet overcome any concerns we may have about taste expectation by linking to more indulgent ideas around triple cooked and roasting.
Flavourful colour
Research on the psychology of colour has its supporters and detractors, but there are times when leaning into colours that have assumed certain connotations in consumers' memory structures can help overcome diminished taste expectations. Take Arla BOB, for example. It's playful and bold and hits you in the face with its bright yellow. Linking with this rich, buttery colour increases expectations of creaminess, tackling head-on one of the challenges of communicating that the product is skimmed milk that tastes like semi-skimmed.
Communicate a positive rather than negative
Trying to directly tackle low taste expectations in comms, like Vita Coco did with their 'impossible to hate' campaign means, you're starting from a negative. Whilst you may want to take an enemy when it comes to your comms, your enemy should come from without - for example, standing against mediocrity or being the antidote to complicated. When you start your comms by highlighting your own weakness, you simply draw attention to it. Vita Coco's insight is likely to have shown them that taste expectation is a major barrier to purchase, but saying 'it's not as bad as you think' is unlikely to break down those barriers, even if it does make for a fun campaign.

Weetabix, by contrast, focuses on their strength (literally and metaphorically) in their brand building. Their comms focus on a message around 'giving you the energy to go about your day'. As consumers, we are encouraged to think about this rather than 'worrying' about expectations of taste. In their activation comms, they focus on showing us how we can create a tasty breakfast through the addition of other ingredients from fruit and yogurt to baked beans!

Communicate what's healthy and tasty
Our client, JuiceBurst , came to us with a challenge. Their HFSS compliant juice-based drink had captured the market when it came to vending in schools but needed to understand how it could appeal to a wider, non-captive audience. Whilst healthiness is an inherent benefit of the product compared with other soft drinks, we found that this younger audience was less motivated by health benefits than by seeking a thirst-quenching hit of flavour. In building the messaging strategy, we encouraged JuiceBurst to focus on telling and showing consumers how real fruit gives the drink its tangy flavour, rather than talking about how real fruit = healthy. This led to their new brand positioning and ultimately to the 'Shake That Tang' campaign.

Remember your marketing 4Ps levers
As well as packaging and comms, research* has also shown that premium pricing can help to improve perceptions of taste. Seedlip's alcohol-free rival to gin makes no apologies for its 'alcohol-freeness', neither in its packaging nor in its price positioning. At £16 to £18, Seedlip has leaned into the language of the category and has pulled hard on the pricing lever to set-up high expectations that we will enjoy a premium, sublime-tasting, albeit alcohol-free, drink.

We've worked with many brands positioned in the 'better for you market', all of which have had their own challenges around taste expectations. Every one of them has said 'if only we could get a sample of our product into the hands of potential consumers then they'd see how good it is' and thus breaking down these barriers. But sampling on this scale is unlikely to be the solution - it's expensive and logistically challenging. And, as we've seen, actual experience of taste is not the same as expectations of taste. First, tackle the expectations, and then deliver.

Thinking about how you leverage all of the tools available to you from packaging, comms and messaging to product adjacency, positioning on shelf and pricing, can all contribute to encouraging consumers to see your product differently.

*Taste perceptions mediate the effect of a health goal on food choice

Who's winning the Euro 22 ad race?

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 11:01:46 GMT

When it comes to advertising around the Euros 22, do women want to be reminded of the struggle? Or do they just want to get excited about supporting their team?

England’s Euros 22 opening match against Austria drew a stadium crowd of 68,871. A massive 3.7 million watched on BBC with a further 750,000 streams on iPlayer. And that’s just in the UK – with 16 nations taking part in the initial stages, there’s clearly plenty of opportunity for sponsors and advertisers.

YAY for the sport and YAY for business!

As the competition gets underway, we looked at the ads picked by The Drum magazine as the best examples from some of the many sponsors of this year’s Euros, which include behemoth brands like Booking.com, Euronics, Grifols, Heineken, Hisense, Just Eat Takeaway.com, Walkers (PepsiCo), Visa, Volkswagen, Adidas, Hublot, Nike, TikTok, Lego, LinkedIn, Pandora, Starling Bank and Gillette Venus.

Great advertising doesn’t just mirror the problem, it presents solutions. Many women already know that our sports are under-supported and underrated, from grass roots to top competitions. We know and perhaps have even experienced the myriad of challenges and barriers that exist when girls and women want to take up ‘traditionally male’ sports like football. And we obviously want to drive change.

Businesses do have a role to play. It takes a village to make change and it takes investment to support it. But on the day, when the whistle blows, do we want to be reminded of the struggle it’s taken to get here? Or do we just want to feel excited, elated, passionate and ready to support our team come what may?

The Drum’s top ad picks can be divided into those that mirror the problem and those that do more to evoke positive emotions and give a real reason to buy their brand.

Perhaps the highest profile offender in the mirroring camp comes from Heineken. Their ‘12 ^th Woman’ ad features Harry Rednapp driving a discussion on gender bias in the female game, encouraging fans to be the 12 ^th woman and get behind the team. Aside from the fact the women are literally being picked up and driven by a man and a man is leading the conversation, it lacks any real sense of drama to achieve what it supposedly sets out to do in terms of getting people excited and engaged in watching the games. Or to buy Heineken for that matter. It’s all about the problem and what divides us!

It's a shame that The Drum chose this ad frankly, because Heineken are doing great things to support the sport and indeed have made a better ad that sits in the second camp – evoking positive emotions and framing a reason to buy the brand.

‘Cheers To All Fans’ features all the passion and excitement we expect in the build up to the Euros 22. The familiar soundtrack sung in a female voice, the clever switch from our innate ‘default male’ bias when we see the first character is a woman, the showing of the traditionally male experiences of the desire to watch the beloved game as something that women share, is exactly where Heineken should be – even if the ‘including men’ at the end is a little grating!

Nike know how to do advertising for women’s sport. In fact, Nike know how to do inclusion in their advertising (even if the same can’t be said for their senior management teams). Their ad for the Euros 22 is exciting, it builds tension and interest and makes you want to watch the game. Women are shown playing football, training and in dynamic, strong poses (rather than being made-up and ‘toned down’ for the male gaze). The messaging is ‘Never Settle’. It’s not an ad – like so many for the Euros 22 – with a slightly patronising and apologetic, ‘well done for getting so far’ tone and a plea to support these poor patriarchy-battling women. It’s saying, of course we are here – we are as good as you, we will make this sport better by being here and we are not ‘grateful’, we want more.

This follows on from their equally powerful 2021 ad, ‘Lose Count’, whose script includes phrases like ‘We are not here to break barriers anymore, we are here to steal your trophies’, and ‘we don’t want empowering anthems, we want fight songs' and even 'sing our praises but do it because we are tough, we make football better'. They have got to the real reason we should support and watch the women’s game.

If the purpose of an ad is to resonate with its target audience, create meaning and saliency, Nike does this. When women and girls are in the market for their first, or next pair of football boots, you can bet Nike will not just be top of mind will have created enough affinity to seal the deal.

And that’s what advertising is there to do. Purpose messaging has a place, but if you want to show that you really get your audience you need to go beyond simply mirroring the problem. Whilst many of this year's Euros 22 ads fall short, Nike are killing it!

Links to The Drum article and ads mentioned below..

Heineken Euros 22: 12th Woman

Heineken Euros 22: Cheers To All Fans

Nike Euros 2022: Never Settle

Nike: Lose Count

The Drum: Best Euros 22 Ads

What Do Mums Really Want?

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 16:20:46 GMT

Every year, Mother's Day brings out the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to marketing and promotional ideas. Rather than trotting out the usual suspects, we take a look at brands with insightful products and communications that understand what the mothers they are targeting really want.

Brands that succeed with ‘mothers’ are those that have understood and developed their strategy and total proposition around that audience, usually over the long term.

We put ‘mothers’ in inverted commas because while it is true there certainly are shared needs and problems that mothers face, women don’t stop being themselves or having their own needs when they have children – or at least most don’t want to. The genericism of ‘mothers’ gifts and communication around Mother’s Day and other times of year often relies on and perpetuates unhelpful stereotypes.

Mother’s Day ranges and comms seem so rarely based on any actual insight or lazy insight at best. They are so often about ‘treating’ her to a day off, some beauty treatments or an afternoon tea. Aside from the fact that basic self-care shouldn’t be positioned as a ‘treat’ or ‘annual one-off reward’ for women, is that really what your mum wants?

Picking on John Lewis, its top 10 gifts under £10 for Mother's Day were a case in point. Make-up, candles and face masks. Why are the Mother's Day gifts not based on interest or personality like gift guides at other times of the year? Pretty disappointing given their big Christmas push around the ‘thoughtful gift’.

But rather than name and shame let’s look at three brands doing a good job of understanding their ‘mother’ segment all year round, as well as on Mother’s Day.

1. Don’t Buy Her Flowers - https://www.dontbuyherflowers.com

The name says it all. A brand built on the annoyance that women always get the gift of flowers as a bit of a catch all. They put together thoughtful customisable gift boxes tying into women’s particular interests or needs. Within the Mother’s Day gifts there are ‘treat’ packs but they are positioned more insightfully as ‘five minutes of peace’ packs. There are also gift boxes that encourage mothers to do more of what they love and pursue their own interests as well as ‘baby-loss’ packages, being sensitive that Mother’s Day isn’t a happy day for everyone. The products and communication have been carefully thought out to treat mothers as the individuals they are.

2. Nike maternity - https://www.nike.com/gb/maternity

Nike maternity have not tried to be everything to everyone that has a child. They have focused on women who would be their target market anyway. They have then focused on how they support them through this specific lifestage, talking to them in the same way they always have, rather than like they have become different people because they have or are about to have children.

The products have been developed thoughtfully with pregnant women (sounds like a no brainer but so many products for women are not designed by/with women). They have understand and overcome specific challenges around exercising when pregnant and have created different fits and variations to suit different needs . They have also curated podcasts, information and support around continuing to exercise and be active while pregnant and the concerns their audience would have around this.

Last year they did a Mothers’ Day advert (see below) that perfectly captured this approach. Their entire proposition is built around clear insight of their audiences need and attitudes to exercise while pregnant. Let’s hope their maternity pay policies for staff and athletes catch up with the quality of this work soon.

3. Peanut - https://www.peanut-app.io/

A kind of Tinder for mums. They recognised how isolating motherhood can be and set out to help people make meaningful connections. They help mothers connect with other mothers based on what they have in common outside of just having a baby. This helps women create deeper and lasting friendships and support groups.

They have also branched out into supporting women going through baby-loss, fertility issues and menopause to connect like-minded women, going through a similar thing. For Mother’s Day they have focused on those that need help most at this time of year and advertised how they can help. Again, they do this type of activity throughout the year and the whole product and the way it communicates is based on deep insight around what women in all these situations need.

In summary – as with all brand marketing, at all times of year, on Mother’s Day, brands that win will have developed their product ranges and communications around a true insight of what their consumers need rather than what they think they want or need based on stereotypes.

Happy Mothers’ Day!

Evaluate Your Marketing Strategy in 5 Easy Steps

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 12:05:24 GMT

We’re all for the myriad definitions of marketing strategy – such as this from Philip Kotler & Kevin Keller who say, “marketing strategy lays out target markets and the value proposition that will be offered based on an analysis of the best market opportunities."

We like to put it even more simply than that – marketing strategy is about where you will play and how you will win.

We often encounter businesses who say they already have a marketing strategy when what they usually mean is that they have a set of tactics that they are implementing on a day-by-day basis. Just as you wouldn’t book a heap of travel tickets without understanding where you want to get to, nor should you start ‘doing marketing’ without articulating what you want to achieve.

With that in mind, here are 5 questions you can ask yourself to evaluate your marketing strategy:

1. Do you know who you are targeting?

Even if you subscribe to Byron Sharp’s model for How Brands Grow, when he says brands should seek to identify the largest possible audience for growth, you still need some understanding of who is and who isn’t in the market. And if, for reasons of resources, or product range, or short versus long term gain, you are targeting discrete groups in your market, then you need to demonstrate a way of articulating the key consumer groups in your market.

The key here is understanding your audience. It’s not enough for you to identify groups or segments of consumers by attributes such as age, gender, income or household size – they can be useful markers, but they rarely say little about how people actually behave in a buying situation.

By understanding, we mean that your marketing strategy should articulate what needs, behaviours and triggers people exhibit when they come into your market. That you’ve identified real people and that you understand the dynamics at play. It’s also important to be able to show your working out – that your consumer segmentation and targeting tracks back to real insight rather than your best guess.

2. Have you articulated what you want the brand or business to stand for?

It takes some getting your head round, but a brand only exists in the mind of your consumers. When we think of a brand, particularly a well-known one, we assign it a meaning which is greater than the sum of its parts. And what we each think of a brand is relative – it’s relative to awareness (it’s hard to attribute meaning to a brand you’ve never heard of), it’s relative to competitors and it’s relative to the buying situation.

There’s no right or wrong way to articulate what your brand or business stands for – vision statement, brand DNA, purpose or brand statement, mission, and so on – but you can stress-test your articulation. It should be:

Simple and easily understood – no complicated brand pyramids or wheels
Meaningful – it doesn’t need to be sexy, but it does need to be distinctive, so generic words like ‘quality’, ‘sustainable’ or ‘innovative’ are rarely helpful
Known throughout the organisation – or if you’re in a multi-brand business, at least by all the people who work on your brand, from the factory floor to the customer service phone line
Enduring – the biggest and best brands in the world haven’t changed what they stand for over decades

Looping back round to the first question, in articulating what you stand for, it’s also vital that you’ve identified how you fulfil a real consumer need (sometimes called a positioning statement).

3. Is your marketing 4Ps framework consistent with your strategy?

The 4Ps are the main marketing levers that any business has in order to execute its marketing strategy. There are plenty of people who will say that there are 5 or even 7 Ps, but if your product (which includes service), promotions (which includes comms and messaging), pricing (which includes price reductions and offers related to price) and place (including distribution and channels) are consistent and all pulling in the same direction, it will make for a smoother route to strategic success.

"Articulate what your brand stands for and ensure your marketing 4Ps framework is consistent and pulling in the same direction"

4. Can you demonstrate how implementing the strategy creates value?

In other words, if you implement your strategy well, will the results be favourable for the business? Of course, this depends very much on what the business wants to achieve.

For many, the strategic aim will be to grow shareholder value and the marketing strategy needs to demonstrate how it will do that. Your marketing strategy should be able to demonstrate how it will have moved the brand / business from where you are now to where you want to be.

We appreciate that marketing activity measurement is a tricky subject. Return on investment is only part of the picture since much of what you will be investing in is creating greater awareness and brand saliency (ensuring that your brand comes to mind in a buying situation). In the same way that standard accounting processes find it difficult to value the brand they aren't always geared up to measure marketing success, but that isn’t to say it can’t be done.

One of the simplest tracking tools you can put in place is the annual brand survey. Understand how your brand is tracking vs. your competitors for awareness, consideration and purchase.

5. Are you all agreed on the strategic priorities?

It seems like such a low barrier to fall at, but all too often, businesses fail in implementing their marketing strategies because the management team doesn’t agree on the strategic priorities and tries to do everything at once. It’s a bit like trying to win a game of chess on the first move or expecting to be able to move all your pieces at once!

It’s highly unlikely that you will be working with unlimited resources, nor is it likely that you will be able to implement your plan without investment. So, given that, you need to agree on the priorities – this first, then that – and on the risks and investment needed to achieve it.

In prioritising, you will need to have an eye for the long and the short – if you always prioritise the short, you will never get to the long (always activating at a campaign or product level) or vice versa which means that whilst you’re busy brand-building over the long term, the coffers are running dry because there’s no short-term activation.

Neither is prioritisation about ‘this’ or ‘that’. It’s about the power of ‘and’, ‘when’, and ‘then’. The strategy of strategy if you like!

"Too often marketing strategies fail because management teams don't agree on the strategic priorities."

BOOBS! Is that still how advertising gets your attention?

Thu, 05 Aug 2021 06:46:39 GMT

BOOBS! Got your attention. Isn’t that still too often the issue in advertising and media portrayals of women?

Thankfully this is changing and World Breast Feeding Week feels as good a time as any to look at positive portrayals of boobs in advertising.

So, let’s start with Tommy Tippy and their work to break taboos about breast feeding.

The brand carried out research with over 750 women and found that many first-time mothers feel under-prepared for the realities of feeding. 74% of the women surveyed globally said they feel society overlooks breastfeeding challenges, with half admitting to feeling pressured to breastfeed, even if they struggle to do so. And 56% of women revealed that breastfeeding affected their mental wellness.

The brand created a campaign to empower women to be more confident about feeding and deliver an honest message about its realities.

We applaud the diversity of body types shown and that the brand did not shy away from the ‘unspoken’ harsh realities and difficulties of feeding. This was quite refreshing vs the usual idyllic images of smiling and blissfully content nursing mums and babies. However, while the ad more truthfully mirrored the realities of breast feeding – did it actually present a way to help with the key issue? Obviously legislation around breastfeeding and alternatives is tight but we would have liked to see Tommy Tippy addressing the issues their insight uncovered. How do you actually support women struggling, feeling under pressure or whose mental health is being impacted by breastfeeding. It didn’t feel like the ad attempted to address or ‘normalise’ those taboo feelings – focus was on what is physically happening and for anyone in the thick of it, they don’t particularly need a reminder on any of that! Still good, positive work, celebratory boob work.

An example of a campaign that has sought to drive positive change both in terms of supporting women and positive portrayal is 'Art for Cancer's' quite frankly stunning book and campaign boobsthebook. It praises and honours all types of women and their boobs to raise awareness and money for breast cancer. They describe it best…

"This book is about what boobs symbolize. As an icon, these fascinating, visually striking, biological wonders of cultural importance transcend language, yet throughout history they have often been misunderstood and mishandled. Boobs are the basic symbols of life, freedom, prosperity, joy, safety, sex, independence – not to mention food – and they tirelessly bear the promise of a brighter future. After you finish reading this

book, you may ask yourself, why, is there anything a boob can’t do?"

The book and video use art from over 80 international artists. It feels uplifting and powerful. It’s an answer not a question around the true power of boobs and how and why we should protect, celebrate them and feel great about them.

See the advert below and buy the book here: https://boobsthebook.com/

Finally we wanted to raise awareness of the work of brand Lonely Label, “Lingerie, for women who wear lingerie as a love letter to themselves.”

The brand is built around the insight that women most often buy and wear ‘nice’ lingerie thinking about how a partner or potential partner will want to see their body. Lonely’s belief is that women should buy and wear nice underwear for themselves and it actively targets single women on that basis. Everything about the brand is refreshing and derived from a female perspective and female gaze. The products are both beautiful, comfortable and fit/work well. The photography on the website and in the brand’s advertising celebrates women’s bodies of all types and ages and is done in a unique non sexualised way.

Click on the link to their site below - it’s worth a look!

We would love to hear about other brands doing positive things in this space. Please comment and share work you have seen and liked.

Now That's Proper Champion!

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 06:59:05 GMT

We’re celebrating Yorkshire Day with a quick look at our Top 5 favourite Yorkshire businesses which happen could be on to summat with their marketing strategies.

Originally a military celebration, Yorkshire Day was reborn in 1975 as a protest to the newly created territory of Humberside - not a successful rebrand as it happens. Thankfully, common sense prevailed and the East Riding of Yorkshire was restored. Still, every year on the 1st August, a different Yorkshire town or city is declared host, the Yorkshire flag carried to its four walls and a declaration swearing loyalty to the county is read aloud!

So, we're doing our bit for county loyalty by sharing our Top 5 Yorkshire businesses whose brand strategies are worthy of special mention.

The City of Hull

The story: unknown to most, Hull (or Kingston upon Hull to give it its full name) suffered significant bombing in the second world war and 95% of housing was damaged or destroyed.

The positioning: some seriously big businesses have made Hull their home thanks to its port access to Europe and the city has gained a reputation as a base for heavy industry and advanced engineering, but….

The challenge: the city centre has continued to suffer disinvestment, the unemployment rate remained stubbornly high and in 2015 Hull was voted one of the worst places to live in the UK.

The fight back: Hull pulled off one of the most audacious rebrands so far this century when, in 2017, it became UK City of Culture. As a centre for bold thinking and radicalism (think William Wilberforce, Mary Wollstonecraft, Amy Johnson, Stevie Smith, Phillip Larkin and Andrew Motion to name but a few), the city didn’t just create a new logo and put on a few events, it developed a new brand identity, assets, and codes to cement its positioning.

Our verdict: 10/10

The UK City of Culture marketing campaign was stunningly executed and helped to shift perceptions of the city, not only outside Hull (the campaign generated six million visitors) but for its residents too.

It recognised culture isn’t just about arts and music generally – it’s about the people of a place and their stories, and this was the foundation for the campaign’s creative idea ‘there is more to the story’.

2017 started by telling the stories people already knew and then unveiling those they didn’t in truly engaging and memorable ways. From the bringing to life of the mythic ‘magic ginnels’ to the monumental installation of a 75m offshore turbine blade, positioned under the cloak of darkness into the city centre, the campaign brought together imagination and creativity with the people and businesses at its heart.

National awareness more than tripled over the course of the project, rising to 66% nationally and 74% in the north and more than £220m of economic impact and inward investment for the city was delivered.

Thanks to this audacious project, Hull is a city on the up and as we say in Yorkshire ‘be reight’!

Great interview here with Martin Green (former Head of Ceremony for the London Olympics) who masterminded the campaign >

Video highlights of the City of Culture campaign >

Source for stats >

Yorkshire Tea

The story: with a long history going back to the late 1800s, Yorkshire Tea is the powerhouse of the Bettys & Taylors Group, whose eponymous brands are Bettys (as in the famous tea rooms) and Taylors of Harrogate Speciality Teas & Coffee. Yorkshire Tea was born in the 1970s when the business wanted a way to take black tea to the masses without damaging existing brands.

The positioning: A proper brew from gods own country! Yorkshire Tea’s purpose and strategy is woven around ‘doing things properly’ and lives throughout the business from the way it sources its tea to the superior quality of its products.

The brand magic really happened when they teamed up with Lucky Generals who created the fantastically successful ‘Proper’ campaign which helped propel the brand from third in the category with 14% share to first with 28%.

The challenge: if there’s one thing that Yorkshire Tea have had a patchy record on, its bringing new products to market. It made a failed bid to move sideways into the biscuit category and whilst the premium blend Yorkshire Gold has endured, without NPD, Yorkshire Tea could start to appear a little old-fashioned compared with some of its rivals.

The fight back: the most recent launches present an interesting take on the brand’s irreverence. The Breakfast and Bedtime blends seem obvious extensions, but the Biscuit and Toast & Jam blends (yes – teas which taste like biscuits and toast and jam) seem like a real leap for the brand into a more fun and funky space. Gone too is the classic Yorkshire scene depicted on the packaging. The proof while be in the drinking!

Our verdict: 9/10

Overall, Yorkshire Tea continues to be a consummate lesson in having a consistent, clear, single-minded brand strategy which embraces purpose without being straight-jacketed by an overly holier than thou proposition.

Who doesn't love a bit of Sean Bean! >

Skipton Building Society

The story: established in 1853 in Skipton, the Society’s original business model was based on agencies rather than branches and it took over 75 years to achieve £1m in assets.

The positioning: in 1991, newly appointed Chief Exec, John Goodfellow embarked on a programme of diversification which saw The Skipton acquire an estate agent business as well as continuing to acquire other failing societies.

The Skipton weathered the credit crunch of 2008 by focusing on its mortgage business and harnessing the synergy from its estate agent subsidiary.

The challenge: by 2020, the business was the fourth largest building society in the UK and perhaps because of this, the leadership team were unconvinced about the need for significant long-term brand investment, preferring instead to focus on shorter-term, functionally oriented messaging.

The fight back: the marketing team embarked on creative development research to define the customer value proposition. The amazingly obvious, but under-leveraged finding, was that, although people look at interest rates first when deciding where to invest, the power of the brand, knowing it and trusting it, accounted for a good proportion of prospective customers’ decision making. People simply don’t trust a good interest alone.

Our verdict: 8/10

Much of the good marketing stuff that we applaud was done internally and has perhaps yet to achieve its full value from a consumer-facing perspective.

A new value proposition – building better futures since 1853 – was created to underpin heritage, scale and status as a building society against the ‘enemy’ of fat cat banks. The business devoted 45% of ATL spend to sponsoring ITV’s late peak drama strand specifically to grow brand awareness – first you must know we exist!

Spontaneous awareness as a savings product provider increased by 230% in less than a year which won the brand the coveted Marketing Week Masters award for bringing insight and research to life.

Read about The Skipton's Marketing Week masters award >

Panache

The story: what could a couple of blokes from Sheffield possibly know about bras? Plenty as it happens! Panache, the D+ specialist bra brand, is a family-run business that will mark its 40 ^th anniversary next year.

The positioning: they channel their innovative technical expertise into functionally first and foremost because ‘every woman deserves a bra that fits’. Amen to that!

The challenge: lingerie is certainly a category that suffers from the ‘male gaze’ and quite often only looks good on narrowly defined body types depicted in typical lingerie adverts.

Whilst you may think that fitting correctly is a hygiene factor in bras, there’s not a single woman out there who doesn’t appreciate the struggle and many brands miss the mark going for style over substance. The challenge for Panache, for a whole bunch of reasons that we won’t go into here, is that ‘pretty’ has always sold when it comes to bras.

The fight back: Panache have shaped their core competencies and their business and brand strategies on meeting the unmet needs of a very clear and specific audience.

Our verdict: 7/10

In their styling and throughout their comms, Panache celebrates beauty and strength, using a female gaze instead of a male one. They prove that you don’t need to be different from competitors to win. They’ve capitalised on relative advantage – investing in the technology and expertise to deliver a better fitting bra – and have done so with style and distinctiveness.

Read #MyRoleModel Panache blog >

Seabrook Crisps

The story: a family-owned business for many years, Seabrook is thought to have pioneered the crinkle cut crisp.

The positioning: the brand originally had a focus on locally sourced, high quality ingredients and strong flavours ‘lovingly made in Yorkshire’. This was married with a quirky and distinctive personality, a sense of craft and doing things proper.

The challenge: Perhaps through a combination of overzealous value engineering and lack of marketing investment, Seabrook seemed to have lost their meaning and salience.

The fight back: new owners Calbee have reinvested in flavour, packaging and comms with a resurrection of their original values and positioning. The new strapline ‘made with pride’ feels like a powerful idea to leverage associations with Yorkshire grit and doing things properly.

Our verdict: 6/10
As good as the packaging, NPD, and TV advertising looks, we don’t feel they’ve yet found a way to bring this positioning fully to life or articulated a strong enough reason to choose Seabrooks. Great to see some intention though…. we really hope to see this old favourite get back on the horse.

View Seabrook Crisps TV Advert >

Five tips to make a small marketing budget go further

Tue, 20 Jul 2021 13:37:31 GMT

For start-ups and SMEs marketing budgets can be a real challenge. Make yours go further with these top tips.

1.) Start with a clear strategic framework to create focus and efficiency

With a small budget it’s important to get hyper focused on who you want to target, what behaviour or perception you want to change and therefore what key message you need to get across. Make the decisions up front on this. Be single minded about it. Then make sure every single thing you put out, be it a Instagram post, advert or website messaging is honed to deliver that message to that audience perfectly. This will give it power, make sure everything is working together and make your activity and spend much more efficient.

Brands like Coca-Cola (sharing/happiness) and Nike (just do it) even with their massive budgets still stick to a tight strategic framework and consistent message – which is why everyone knows what they stand for. Huel used this approach to catapult their growth – consistently and with impact, focusing on their core benefit of nutritionally complete meals across all comms and channels. Despite initially low budget marketing they grew quickly, at only 5 years old it sell over 50m meals a day.

2.) Invest in decent creative

Small brands often skimp on creative as they want to put the money into execution (adverts and media space). There is little point spending money on execution if how it looks doesn’t grab people and make them want to buy your brand.

Do not underestimate the power of effective creative in making your money go further (or of poor creative to destroy your brand). Intelligent, high impact, creative that effectively translates your strategy can allow a small spend campaign to punch well above its weight in impact, recall and effectiveness.

Who Gives A Crap's low budget ads also had a huge impact due to a clever and impactful creative idea that perfectly told their story and reason for consumers to buy. Here is a case study about how their iconic zero budget launch ad enabled them to launch and rapidly grow the business. It has now had over 250,000 views.

New Agencies are out of reach for many small brands but there are fantastic freelancers out there who have worked for high-end agencies so can deliver that quality for much lower cost but still be prepared to make a reasonable investment. You usually get what you pay for so decent creatives are not ‘cheap’ but can transform your brand and comms so don’t skimp on this bit.

3.) Partnerships and contra deals

Finding the right collaborative partnerships is a great way to get high quality, credible awareness, understanding and meaning for small brands at low financial cost.

This can take the form of supplying your product or services to events or venues free or discounted in exchange for media (digital or real world) or access to customer databases. We previously worked in radio stations and offered advertising on the station or use of our presenters to events, venues and sports clubs in return for sponsorship. We secured over £1m worth of sponsorship and advertising on a contra basis – the cost to activate it was less than £5k. Working in food manufacturers we have also offered to provide all the food or drinks to events or venues in return for media and promotion at the event.

It could also be about forming alliances with like-minded, complimentary brands targeting the same audience as you. Sharing each other’s social content, promoting each other via your websites, databases, social activity or packaging. Having joint events, competitions or even doing joint advertising to share the cost. In the past we worked with a sausage and bacon brand and we carried out joint advertising and marketing with a bread brand showing sausage/bacon sarnies. We split the cost of the photography, ad creation and cost of the ads and by going in together we got greater efficiency/more for our money in terms of the ad spend.

4.) Trigger point placement

Being in the right place at the right time is undoubtedly the best way to drive short term return and bang for buck on comms.

If you see an ad on TV it has to be pretty special and/or be shown often enough over a long enough period of time for the brand to be preferred, sought out and top of mind by the time at time of purchase. These sorts of channels are about long term brand building, equity and power.

However, you can be clever with low budget tactical marketing to make yourself top of mind as someone wants/needs a product like yours or as they are about to purchase it. While this may not drive long term brand value it can influence that specific purchase decision.

If you are an FMCG brand, think about what you can do with your packaging or shelf ready packaging (trays the product sits in) to make yourself stand out when the final purchase decision is being made. If you had to pay a retailer for a shelf talker in 100 stores for 4 weeks it would probably cost you around £30,000 so cleverly using your own packaging (which is in all stores, all year) could give you £500k plus worth of media impact to draw/tempt people to try you at the point of purchase.

For all brands but particularly online brands, search engine optimisation and marketing is another great way to ‘be there’ as consumers as consumers are triggered to need a product like yours. Think about what someone who needs a product like yours might be searching for online and then how you can optimise content and website or use google words/paid to appear as they are searching for that.

IKEA did this super clever campaign where the renamed their products after relevant search terms – so when someone searched for ‘my husband snores’ the Ikea day bed/pull out sofa came up. The campaign had over 100,000 shares and a reach of 175m reach. It showed their products as solutions to the need at the point it was being felt. Watch the IKEA Retail Therapy case study below.

Also think about how can you physically be there at the point of need. For example, if you are a refreshing soft drink being available to try or purchase at hot weather events means not only are people going to try you but it will help them remember and associate you with that situation in future. Can you have your own stand, branded vending machine selling/sampling your product in relevant places?

Robinsons have a long standing partnership and association with Wimbledon making them physically and mentally available at a point of need.

5.) Corporate / business to business application

If you are not already a B2B brand, thinking about how you can do some business to business marketing can also be a cost effective way to reach a lot of people. Is your service or product relevant to businesses or a particular type of business? If you can target and sell through 2-3 businesses you can often reach 100s or thousands of consumers doing that. You can approach or build relationships with relevant businesses through networking or Linked In often more cost effectively than it would be to reach all the consumers within that business via consumer media. A great example is a brand like Graze – by developing partnerships with businesses they could supply and reach large offices full of people through a few contacts.

They are our top five tips for making small marketing budgets go further. If you need help developing your marketing strategy or creating and managing cost-effective campaigns we now offer an 'outsourced marketing team' service in addition to our usual strategic consultancy. This allows small brands who don't currently have a marketing team to hire ours ad-hoc ,as needed. Please get in touch for more information about this.

The sat nav & the driver: the difference between brand and creative strategy

Thu, 17 Jun 2021 12:08:41 GMT

There is a big difference and critical relationship between brand strategy and creative strategy. Both have to be effective and work together to drive strong brands. creative strategy.is is a subtitle for your new post

Nine times out of ten, when brands tell us that they have a brand strategy, what they really mean is that they have a creative strategy and/or a communications plan. There’s a big difference between the two...

A creative strategy is like the driver. When you jump in the brand’s cab, it’s who you see and who you engage with. The driver has a personality, tone, style and a point of view that does or doesn’t work for you. She makes you feel comfortable or uncomfortable, want to chat with her or to simply to pretend you’re reading a book and avoid eye contact!

The driver choses the environment you travel in according to her taste – how the car looks, feels and smells and what’s on the radio – loud, chatty and fun or sombre, quiet and calm. The environment the driver creates impacts how you feel in the moment and by association how you feel about the cab ride, and following that, how you feel about the whole brand. It impacts whether you’re happy to stay in the cab or want to get out as soon as possible and even whether you want to use that cab company again.

Importantly, the driver is also making the car go – she is making the sale, taking the money and transporting you to your destination, where you want and need to be. She is making that connection between you and your destination happen.

That is what good creative strategy is about. It’s about creating a visual and sensory world for the brand – creative assets such as logos, packaging, brand colours and style – that you use consistently to create short cuts and signposts to your brand and which will connect and appeal to your target audience.

It’s also about creating the right environment, messages, point of view and personality that appeal to your consumers and imbue the right meaning in and benefits of your brand. Finally, it’s about the execution – the campaigns and communications tactics – that flow from this; the messaging, straplines, tone and story-telling in your adverts and communications that help consumers understand what you stand for and how you will meet their needs.

No matter how amazing the driver is, or how well she drives, she still needs a sat nav (or a map or knowledge of a map - if you are old school) to get you to the right destination. There is no point having a fun, memorable and interesting cab ride if you don’t get to the destination you wanted.

Brand strategy is the sat nav (or map). It is the boring white box that gathers all the data and information about all the routes you could travel and makes clear, rational decisions about which route to take (and which routes to definitely avoid) to get to your growth targets most efficiently and competitively.

It then articulates how you’re going to get there. What consumer needs you are targeting and how you are going to meet them differently or distinctively from your competitors.

A brand strategy sets a path for how your brand is going to grow long term and what changes you need to make. It looks at where you are headed and when you hit a problem it calculates alternative routes to get there.

A brand strategy understands how you are currently seen and experienced by consumers and where you need to be. It identifies how consumer perceptions and behaviours need to change to change for your brand to appeal to them.

It articulates the direction of travel and provides a guide for creative agencies to develop effective creative ideas and campaigns. And a brand strategy is so much more than just comms. It provides a framework for how your product, processes, price, distribution and comms need to operate or change to meet your target consumers’ needs and change their behaviours and perceptions.

It’s not sexy (at least not to the average person!) and it should be summarised in just a few pages of very concise decisions about what you are (and are not going to do).

It’s not about straplines and storytelling – that’s the job of the creative idea.

Brand strategies and creative strategies are different and one can only be informed by the other. The brand strategy is the sat nav – it sets a course and only changes that course when circumstances change. It should give a very clear and singular direction about who you are targeting and how you will meet their needs and change their perceptions and behaviours. It’s dispassionate and concise and it applies to all aspects of your brand not just comms.

Creative strategies are the driver – the brand personality that consumers see and engage with. They direct how you look and act in front of the customer and arguably is where the magic happens. The bit that transports consumers and shows them how the brand understands them in an emotive, memorable and appealing way.

What’s more, they require very different skill sets and experience to develop. Just like a sat nav, brand strategy and brand management are not the product of creativity and imagination – they are built on solid analytics, research, experience and frameworks. Creative strategies rarely work without a brand strategy and brand strategies aren’t brought to life without a creative strategy.

And just as you would go to different companies to buy your sat nav and book a taxi ride, so too should you work with different experts for your brand and creative strategies.

We do the sat nav not the taxi ride! If you need an experienced specialist to create, articulate, review or reset your brand strategy or even if you need an objective view on your last taxi ride (your creative strategy), call us on 07977 131384 or email hello@atalantemarketing.com

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Time to say goodbye to the hapless dad and other stereotypes

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 11:14:33 GMT

We talked about the hapless dad and other media tropes in our interview with Tayler Scriber, doctoral film and sociology student and rising Tik Tok star.

That assumptions and stereotypes are still frequently used in place of insight, understanding and authentic profiling to understand consumers is frustrating. At best, it makes for less-than-optimal marketing and at worst, it alienates and is harmful to large swathes of the population.

Most marketers are in denial that the use of stereotypes to identify target audiences is even an issue. According to the 30 Percent Club’s ‘Are you missing millions’ report, while 76% of female and 88% of male marketers think they understand consumers, a whopping 76% of female and 71% of male consumers believe the way they are portrayed in advertising is ‘completely out of touch’.*

Kantar found that globally 51% of LGBT consumers said: “I wish I could see more ads with families like mine”. 14% of African Americans and 66% of Hispanics feel not enough brands do a good job of representing their community and 79% of over-55s feel that advertising portrays them inaccurately. *

That’s a lot of work still to do.

We talked to film and sociology doctorate student and TikToker Tayler Scriber about this issue. Tayler has sought to explore and educate on stereotypes in TV and film with her TikTok series ‘You Hate To/Love To See It’. Many of the tropes she highlights are prevalent in media and advertising too.

Tayler agrees, saying: “I see a lot of the same tropes I recognise in film in advertising and media. For example, the ‘bumbling dad’, unable to competently care for the children or house which links to the ‘Himbo’ (link to Himbo tik tok vid) film trope. Most couples, particularly those that have young kids now, are much more egalitarian in how they split care tasks and dad is very involved and perfectly competent of taking care of the children and very much sees this as being as much his role as the mother. I think men and women find it unrelatable and maybe even insulting. Ads that continue to perpetuate this idea are not doing brands any favours.”

Tayler explains the himbo stereotype in her TikTok video.

The hapless dad stereotype is one recognised by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) rules on gender stereotyping introduced in June 2019. The Philadelphia Cheese ad featuring ‘hapless dads’ so entranced by their cheese snacks they absent-mindedly place their kids on the airport-style conveyor belt meant for the food, was banned in 2019. The rules also led to a ban of People Per Hour’s "You do the girl boss thing. We'll do the SEO thing" following complaints that it perpetuated harmful gender stereotypes by depicting a woman running a business in a patronising way.

The Philadelphia ‘hapless dad’ ad that was banned for perpetuating harmful stereotypes.

These ads are recent and they demonstrate a real gulf between what consumers want and need, and how they see themselves compared with the way that marketers see them.

Research conducted by Cunningham & Roberts for their recent book Brandsplaining: Why Marketing Is Still Sexist & How To Fix It, analysed 120 UK and US brand ads, their websites, packaging and social media. They also surveyed 14,000 women in 14 countries across four continents to understand their attitudes and beliefs about marketing and advertising.

More than half (59%) of the women surveyed say advertising has an out-dated view of women, with 76% suggesting they mainly see very thin women featured in ads. Women featured in ads also tend to be young, with 68% saying there aren’t enough older women in advertising.

Most women (68%) also do not feel represented in advertising, with the vast majority (81%) saying they want to see all types of women used by brands to promote their goods.

Physical attractiveness, getting married and having children is still most often depicted as the great ‘aspiration’ for women. Yet appearance is not what women want to be defined by – the characteristics that women most want to be associated with are intelligence, their relationship with their family and sense of humour. Appearance doesn’t even make the top 10.

Tayler commented: “I think there is progress. It feels like there are brands like Nike Women that are doing a really good job of female representation and diversity. Their ads are really progressive and break down gender and racial stereotypes but then when you look at their board that isn’t reflected in the organisation.

"Even if brands are doing a better job of diversity and inclusion, there is still an issue when the power (in the film making or advertising and creative industry) is held by a very narrow ‘type’ of person. Certainly, in the US film industry this is this case. The USC Annenburg Inclusion Report recently found in 2019 only 10.7% film directors and 19.4% of writers were female and of all the popular films made 2007-2020 only 6.1% of directors were black, 3.7% Hispanic/Latino and 3.3% Asian American.

"And while you don’t necessarily need to be from a community to depict them authentically (if you research and engage them correctly) the reality is that underrepresentation is translating into what you see on screen. In the top 100 films in 2019 the ratio of male characters with a speaking role to women was 2.2:1. Only 1.4% of films had a speaking role for a LGBT character, and only 2.4% of speaking roles were someone with a disability”.

Tayler talks about diversity behind the camera in another of her TikTok videos.

Full USC Annenburg Inclusion Report here .

These stats are echoed in the advertising and creative industry.

It’s estimated that only 14% of creative directors in the UK are women. 13% of the creative industry workforce identify as coming from Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds (which is in line with the % of UK population identifying this way) but only 8% of senior positions have BAME representation.

Tayler says: “It’s an issue that the industry is falling short in terms of representation behind the camera as it points to more systemic bias and discrimination and this needs resolving. However, the issues in the outputs come down to an arrogance about what people think they know about other people’s lives which would be greatly helped if they just talked to the people they are writing about and depicting.

"It’s not to say a man can’t make a good film/ad that portrays a women – we have seen this done when writers and directors have taken time to really understand the subject. People often think they ‘know’ a consumer and don’t realise they are making unhelpful or inaccurate assumptions.

"Actually, even Spike Lee, who is an applauded black film maker, known for authentic and positive representations of the black community made a film called Chi-raq about the impact of gun violence on the drill-rap community and their families in Chicago. There was a huge backlash – people felt really poorly represented and they found it demeaning and alienating. He assumed he got it and had permission to talk about this issue but he is not from Chicago and didn’t engage and talk to the community he was depicting. Just talk to people about what you are saying about them before you say it. I’m sure that’s as applicable to advertising and marketing as film”.

Chi-raq attracted controversy

This complex example demonstrates the breadth and depth of the issue. The bottom line is that doing your research and finding true insight and understanding of all the people you are talking to and representing is an imperative in film and advertising.

Brands, and the marketing teams behind them, are still failing to spot the bias demonstrated in their ads.

Only recently Gap came underfire for an ad that many interpreted as an embodiment of the ‘Side Kick of Colour’ where the little black girl is literally propping up the main character.

Tayler explains the 'side kick of colour' trope and Gap came under fire in their recent ad .

It’s not just comms and casting in adverts that needs to be considered for inherent bias. Products and packaging are often developed without broad insight and consideration. Whether that be ‘feminised’ cleaning products or recent examples such as automatic handwashes and medical equipment that don’t recognise black skin.

Tayler highlighted the example of Prada’s sambo bag charms which included un-relatable and offensive depictions of PoC.

“It feels hard to believe that these have been developed with any engagement of the people they seem to be attempting to depict," she said.

The bag charms were eventually pulled

Even before marketers get to packaging or representation through creative development or ad casting, their marketing strategies have often made assumptions about people based on demographic characteristics that translate into campaigns, activity and products skewed towards a particular type of audience rather than a particular ‘need’ which is much more universal and not couched in gender, age or race identity.

Tayler observed: “I’ve noticed some low quality, cheaper brands like sugary drink brands, try to associate themselves with an urban audience, they cast the stereotype of that type of person and use stereotypical music in their ads. I often wonder if that is because they assume that audience are from a lower economic status so are more likely to buy that product? Or is it trying to ‘lend’ edginess to the brand – either way stereotypes are at play.”

This is also seen in industries like cleaning where marketers set out to target women rather than target the cleaning ‘need’ that is more universal. This then translates into more female focused ads, product design and targeting, perpetuating the stereotype of cleaning being a women’s role.

Apart from the obvious societal impact for brands, it alienates valuable customers. The advent of digitalised media channels, on-demand TV and music means consumers don’t passively consume biased adverts and media anymore. They can choose the TV, films, programmes and articles they want to watch or read. They can pay not to see ads at all or accept advertising based on what they are engaged with and interested in. Audiences who are not being well represented or portrayed will disengage with media and become unreachable to those brands.

Tayler summed up: “The fact that people are now watching streamed content through web series or channels like Netflix means they really can choose what they want to watch and that’s the future. People don’t have to put up with media or shows that don’t represent them. There is so much choice and particularly for the younger generation, this is mainly how they seem to be watching now. It’s a trend that’s helped to create opportunities behind the camera too which has naturally spawned more diverse programming.

“I think the message is just talk to people, talk to people that are not like you to find out about them. Don’t assume you know them or their life experience or what they want. Whether it’s film or advertising, it starts with understanding your audiences and making sure they are represented authentically.”

Thank you so much to Tayler Scriber for taking the time to talk to us about these issues and for her fantastic work educating on equality and respect in media. We recommend following Tayler on TikTok - her content has been really instructive and helpful for us to lean in.

Tayler Scriber is a Doctoral Student at Northwestern University, Illinois Screen Cultures program. She previously majored in Film and Sociology and runs a popular TikTok account centred on media, mutual respect and learning. She is open to compensated speaking opportunities and content creation. Follow her at linktr.ee/Tay.Jpeg

Sources:

Kantar - Getting Gender Right
PWC - Are You Missing Millions?
Brandsplaining by Jane Cunningham and Philippa Roberts, Feb 2021 (a fantastic read - available to buy here )
Creative Review - Female Creatives
Creative Industries Federation - Diversity Booklet
The Dots - Championing Diversity

Is purpose marketing bullsh*!t?

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 08:59:13 GMT

Should purpose have a role in marketing?

Atalante are huge fans of Mark Ritson but we have to admit to being surprised at seeing ‘purpose’ and Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle in his top 10 list of Marketing Bulls&*t.

We agree purpose should be an internal driver of culture and how a business behaves, not just towards its consumers but also towards its employees, suppliers and partners. While brand strategy and communications should focus on how a brand meets a consumer need.

Most often these are not the same thing.

When brands talk about purpose without it linking to a consumer need, or if the purpose that the brand supposedly supports is flimsy and not truly lived, consumers will see through it. It's this surface-level approach to purpose which gives it, and Simon Sinek's Golden Circle, a bad name.

Mark Ritson pulled back the curtain on several brands where purpose is clearly the work of clever creative rather than a heartfelt, living and breathing ethos. Take the SSGA Fearless Girl campaign launched to promote gender diversity. It followed research that showed companies with gender diversity in their leadership teams outperformed those without it. In the same year they became embroiled in a row about their own gender pay gap.

Click here or on the image above to link to Mark Ritson's article and webinar.

But just occasionally, a brand's purpose is genuine. It drives their actions, culture and the way they make and sell their products, and it aligns with a real consumer need.

The organic category is one which provides several examples of brands and businesses living their purpose. According to the Soil Association , the organic sector grew 12.6% over the last year despite the economic conditions and it having a sizeable price premium. There's no doubt that the pandemic fuelled much of this growth as consumers were made more starkly aware of health and sustainability issues and wanted to make better choices for the planet. Organic farming and production is a purpose-led movement which meets this need.

Yeo Valley is one of the biggest brands in the organic category. They focus on and actively promote their organic credentials and ‘put nature first’ philosophy and neatly communicate it in their commercials .

As a result, they have been rewarded with 13.5% growth and a place this year in Britain’s top 50 brands. It’s not just a marketing campaign cooked-up to follow the zeitgeist; Yeo Valley have always been organic, are very passionate about it and have always been extremely active in promoting organic farming and its positive impact for the planet, even when consumers were more skeptical. Not simply to sell products, but because they believed it was the right thing to do.

Farming in a way that protects nature and puts nature first has been their purpose from the start and it has guided the types of product they produce and how they produce them. It’s a source of competitive advantage as their products are considered by many as superior in terms of quality and taste.

When most consumers just saw organic as the ‘posh aisle’ Yeo pivoted on family owned, taste and naturalness credentials and even took organic out of their product titles to maintain accessibility and focus on what their consumers wanted and needed. They stayed organic (and we suspect would attribute the superior taste and naturalness of their products to being organic) but talked about taste and naturalness – attributes they could deliver better than anyone else in the yogurt category.

As planet and ethical farming has become more important for consumers, Yeo Valley have been able to tell a compelling story that has always been there. It is the reason to believe in their taste and naturalness and has the added dimension of being better for the planet which is becoming a driver for consumers when choosing which brands they buy.

Adrian Carne, Managing Director, Yeo Valley Organic said: “At Yeo Valley we always put the consumer first and believe that being trusted is key to our brand success. That’s why we live our purpose everyday and this in turn gives us our competitive advantage and USP.”

Another great example is Atalante favourite: Who Gives A Crap , the toilet paper brand which is 'good for your bum, good for people and good for the planet'.

The brand was specifically set up with the purpose of providing toilets for people that need proper sanitation. 50% of profits go to raise money for this cause. It's a good product and it is recycled but this isn't significantly different from other brands on the market.

What makes it distinctive is the brand's purpose, the way it uses its profits and the fact that this proposition fulfills a need other toilet paper brands can't meet. Its customers probably don't have time to go on rallies or to raise money directly for charitable causes and Who Gives A Crap provides a simple solution - a hassle free product swap which isn't a compromise on quality. By focusing its brand message and targeting people who literally 'give a crap', it's found an audience willing to pay a significant premium.

Link to Who Gives A Crap's website by clicking he re or by clicking on the image above.

Purpose shouldn’t be marketing bullshit.

It should be a behind-the-scenes guiding light for brand and company culture. It should be consistent and long term. If a brand’s purpose meets these criteria and aligns to their consumers’ needs then it has a legitimate place in brand communications.

But beware. If your brand’s ‘purpose’ was conceived by an agency as part of a marketing campaign to garner warmth and affection and it isn’t something you genuinely live within the company, or even if it’s the aspiration but you’re not there yet, then don’t be surprised if you get called out.

The problem with bullshit is that it stinks and consumers will smell it a mile off!

Good strategy

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 08:42:18 GMT

“All men see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”

Sun Tzu

Have a feeling that you’re missing something but not quite sure what? Here are a few pointers to help you diagnose a starting point.

Do you have a marketing strategy?

Or do you just have a bunch of stuff that you need to get done? If you have a strategy but you don’t know if it’s a good one, or you’re wondering what a strategy should do, ask yourself whether it answers these questions:

· Who is your brand or business targeting?

· What is your position in relation to your target audience?

· How do you stand forward to your target audience?

· What are your marketing objectives?

· What do you want your target audience to think, feel and do?

Your marketing strategy should provide a framework that guides all marketing tactics, campaigns and activities. If you already realise that you’re busy ‘doing marketing stuff’ but without really knowing why or to whom, then its time to go back and work on your strategy.

Can you describe your target audience in one sentence?

Good strategy starts with a clear understanding of exactly who your target audience is.

What do you know about your consumers?

Here are a few questions to help identify whether you really know your target audience:

· How do you currently describe your audience?

· Does that description only describe what your consumer looks like on the outside or how they might be

feeling, thinking and behaving from the inside?

· Do you understand the functional needs that they have?

· Do those functional needs translate to emotional needs?

· Have you validated your thinking with your audience?

If you haven’t validated your thinking, if you’re only using basic socio-demographic profiling (such as age, status, location) or if you’re basing your marketing strategy only on functional needs, then you’re probably targeting and reflecting an idealised fictional stereotype of your audience or risk your message not being distinctive enough.

Understanding, reflecting and focusing on emotional triggers and attitudes allows you to connect meaningfully and memorably with a bigger audience.

What’s in it for consumers?

Consumers can derive value from your brand in different ways – economic, functional and emotional. If you’ve identified the needs that your target audience has, you can articulate the brand and / or product positioning. This is the intended brand image that you want to engender in the mind of your consumer.

· Do you have a brand and / or product positioning statement?

· Does it articulate the single, most important claim that distinguishes you from the competition – or is it a

shopping list of attributes, benefits and values?

· Is your positioning relevant to your consumer’s needs?

· Does it resonate with them – does it feel personally meaningful?

· Is it realistic? Will your positioning be believed?

Moving up the benefit ladder from features to a deeper emotional positioning helps your brand create deeper resonance and meaning.

Ditch the stereotype

When brands remove stereotyping and inequality from their marketing, they see better results, have wider appeal and create stronger equity and differentiation.

The latest from data and insights company Kantar tells us that advertising free from stereotypes creates 37% more branded impact, 28% uplift in purchase intent and increases enjoyment of ads by 35%.

Sound strategy begins with understanding the context

Five things brands can learn from home-schooling

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 14:25:05 GMT

On World Book Day we have been reading the ‘The Brave Learner’ by Julie Bogart and we've been struck by what brands can learn from the home-schooling experience many of us have undertaken over the last year.

H ere are five brand strategy principles inspired by The Brave Learner and our own home-learning experiences which most parents can probably relate to:

Set ‘Big Hairy Audacious Goals’
JFK didn’t just bang on about the importance of space travel he challenged NASA to land on the moon. Bogart didn’t try to teach her daughter about 19 ^th century culture from a book - they challenged themselves to throw a historically accurate ball.

When you focus on the outcome vs the activities to get there, everyone gets behind it with zeal and energy. They come up with and drive the ideas and activities to get there (sometimes in ways you haven’t thought of). And others get caught up in the energy of this and start to follow. As Simon Sinek always says people buy your ‘why’ not your ‘what’. Start your brand strategy with a really clear vision of how you want to change the world.
Find out what drives and enchants your child/customer
When you can couch learning in something your child loves they buy into it energetically without coercion. Setting up the elf and shoemakers shop, measuring and pricing the shoes and selling them to a sibling (at a huge profit) unsurprisingly went down much better than a video maths lesson. My daughter didn’t even know she was doing maths.

When brands really understand what their customers care about and what motivates them and show how they can help with that brands (or maths lessons) sell themselves.
‘One thing principle’
The Brave Learner talks about importance of picking one item, idea or principle and really getting to know it, enjoying it and then reminiscing about it to really establish and land the idea with the child. People don’t really grow out of this.

Consumers are hit with so many messages every day, if you want them to remember and understand your brand you need to pick one thing, one idea you are going to stand for. Talk about that in everything you do. Show that same thing over and over but in different ways and then keep reminding them about it. Having a really clear and consistent meaning and message is what builds brands and helps people (adults and children) remember them.
Read, experience, encounter
You can show a child a book about space, however they are unlikely to remember the details the same as if you went to a planetarium. And, actually, they are unlikely to really ‘get it’ till you point out the stars in the night sky.

Brand communications need to be three-dimensional. You need long form/factual elements that explain what you are but to be engaging and memorable you need to show consumers what you do and help them experience or imagine the experience of how it can make them feel.
Magic Doors
Kids need short cuts to ideas. Trying to explain heat as energy to a five year old - not that easy. Lighting an empty tea bag and seeing how that makes it shoot up to the ceiling (responsible parents of the year strike again) got the point across. Adults need shortcuts too – people have a lot on their minds and your brand and brand messages are just not that important to them.

Brands need to develop visual cues and shortcuts to help consumers understand quickly what you are about with minimal effort/thinking. In too many ads and pieces of packaging brands try to cram in too many text/verbalised messages which - in the 1-3 seconds someone spends looking at your pack/ad they are not going to take in. What are your magic doors? What are the visual short cuts such as colour/shape/font style/images/music or other sensory plays that can do the heavy lifting, so you don’t have to say it in text.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this blog in the comments. What has home-schooling taught you about brand strategy? What are your BHAG or magic doors?

New year, same old s***?

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 16:32:33 GMT

British audiences want TV ads that reflect the full diversity of British society, but is that what they're getting?

There is a persistent gulf between advertisers and audiences that we have long known exists but which many marketers are now determined to address. This crisis of faith and a lack of trust that consumers harbor towards brands and the businesses behind them, has been cast into the spotlight over the last year.

In September 2020, the ISBA launched its Diversity & Inclusion Tracking research. With the aim of reducing the persistent gulf between advertisers and audiences, its early findings make for uncomfortable reading.

Within the advertising audience, 68% of respondents believe that TV ads should reflect modern British society yet only 42% believe they do. And in the follow-up question, “do TV ads do a good job of representing all groups within British society?” only 36% agreed with the statement compared with 42% in March 2020.

Whether this worsening of perception is attributable to higher TV viewing during the pandemic or the heightened visibility of inclusion issues like Me Too and Black Lives Matter, the results are clear – advertisers have to work harder if we are to meet the standards our audiences expect.

It is no coincidence that we founded Atalante in 2020 in the wake of this advertising-audience gulf. We know there is a better way of doing things, but we also understand why so many advertisers continue to fall back on stereotypes and tropes to promote their brands.

In this 2020 round-up we take a look at who is doing it well, who scores points for trying and who really needs to take a good look at what’s going on in their marketing departments and creative agencies.

THE GOOD

1. Durex ‘sex positive’

In February 2020, announced that it was “creating a new brand purpose and visual identity to try to combat harmful stereotypes in porn.” With younger audiences in mind, Durex launched its new campaign on Valentine’s day, urging its audience to “Take a stand for sex. Worry less about how it ‘should’ look. Celebrate how it can feel. Where porn’s not the norm. And STDs are kinda real. Women aren’t judged too quick. Guys aren’t told they need a big ****.”

https://hbw.pharmaintelligence.informa.com/RS150389/RB-Has-Repositioned-Durex-For-The-COVID-Generation

2. Nike ‘dream crazier’

What is so empowering about this social content ad from Nike is that it shows women athletes for good and for bad, removing the stereotype that women should always be pretty, meek and mild. There is lots to unpack with Nike though – for example, they don’t pay maternity cover for their athletes – and it isn’t enough just to talk the talk. But when it comes to giving women and girls a balanced and ultimately more positive image of them as physical beings, this ad hits the mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWfX5jeF6k4

3. Starbucks ‘every name’s a story’

Winner of the 2019 Channel 4 Diversity in Advertising award, this campaign just scrapes into our 2020 list as it fully launched in January. Building on the simple ‘service feature’ of names on cups, this campaign focuses on the journey of a young trans boy trying out his name for the first time. Why it matters? It is estimated that around 1% of the population identify as transgender but only 0.3% of adverts feature or include transgender people.

https://www.marketingweek.com/starbucks-wins-channel-4-diversity-award/

4. AA ‘love that feeling?’

When you identify the attitudes, motivations and feelings of your audience, you can begin to understand what drives them. And when your marketing strategy reflects this, rather than simply the way you see your audience, you have the potential to create memorable and distinctive ads. As the AA have so beautifully illustrated, once identified, the human truth can be portrayed by a dog… and not even a real one!

https://www.theaa.com/about-us/love-that-feeling-advert

5. Naga Munchetty ‘because I want to’

Not a marketing campaign although arguably Naga is living her personal brand. The level of scrutiny that women in the media still face for the way they dress is astounding. Naga’s response to John Nurden’s tweet is priceless and needs no further introduction.

6. Spotify ‘2020 wrapped’

Spotify’s 2019 meme campaign proved, much like the AA, that when you identify a human story that connects your audience to your brand, a world of creativity opens in the way you dramatize the message in your ad. Spotify’s annual wrapped campaign for 2020 focused on “recognising and celebrating the human stories of the year.”

7. B&Q ‘build a life’

It’s fair to say that the pandemic brought out the best and worst in marketers and ad creatives everywhere. Cue the schmaltzy piano music, the oh-so-caring voice over and the home-grown video of us all just giving it a go – and then insert brand name.

B&Q’s build a life campaign stands out above the rest simply because they stuck to their knitting. Not only are the brand codes all there – the strapline, the logo, the block orange colours – but the message hits the right tone of positivity. The launch film does a pretty good job of reflecting modern British society too.

https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/build-a-life/

8. Tesco ‘about b****y time’

It seems like such a simple product extension to have figured out but the fact that it took a major retailer until 2020 to do is astonishing. Still, here it is, plasters for a range of different skin tones.

9. Sainsbury’s ‘the gravy song’

It wasn’t the best Christmas ad out there, but we wanted to put a shout out for Sainsbury’s gravy song ad – part of a wider Christmas campaign for the supermarket. The backlash that this ad caused is unfathomable – the idea that a narrative based on family traditions wasn’t relatable because it depicted a black family, is bonkers. So, you can’t identify with this family but you’re all over Kevin the Carrot? Give us a break.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqtcpLywgRU

POINTS FOR TRYING

10. Mothercare ‘#bodyproudmums’

Whilst we applaud Mothercare for helping to normalise post-natal bodies, we’re not sure what the benefit is that they’re trying to sell. However, if #bodyproudmums is simply the start of a journey towards using realistic models to demonstrate modern parenting, then we’re all for it – what’s more, if Mothercare demanded that their suppliers do the same on their packaging and in their advertising then this could be a real movement for change.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BvLrFATH4nZ/

11. Lynx ‘hot since 1995’

It’s good to see a girl taking some control in this ad, but why still a pretty girl paired with a geek? Why are we still telling men being sexually successful or attractive is what matters? If Lynx could dig a little deeper, there’s bound to be a more aspirational human truth about how we get to feel confident and comfortable in our skin – if Unilever can do it for Dove, they could do it for Lynx too. And what’s with the humping squirrel at the end?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBxmuz3JBok

12. Bodyform ‘#wombstories’

Hurray for the movement to normalise periods – and for the abolition of VAT on sanitary products. We do need big brands to be lobbying for this kind of change, but there’s a difference between being on my side and holding a mirror up to my life.

Bodyform’s #wombstories campaign was divisive. Many applauded the stark-naked truthfulness it depicted whilst others just don’t want to see all the pain and gore of it. Ultimately, though, a brand needs to show how it fulfils a need and this campaign doesn’t quite hit the mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZoFqIxlbk0

13. Tena Lady ‘ageless’

In a similar vein to Bodyform, there are some things to applaud with this ad – the depiction of older women and the ‘normalising’ of the type of incontinence we experience as we age.

Tena’s research showed that 44% of women under 50 think bladder leakage would affect their sex life compared with just 10% of women over 50 who agree. Where the story narrative seems to fall is the connection between having sex with incontinence and Tena Lady.

It’s not enough to for a brand to take on big topics, even when it is authentic. We’re all for them being on our side, but they still need to have a solution and we’re not sure this one quite resonates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5yPmIckIjo

14. Representation of BAME communities

Another not strictly marketing entry in our top 20 with admittedly a lot to unpick. Creative Diversity Network research into representation within the TV and broadcasting industry shows that things are moving in the right direction but that there is still much to do, particularly when it comes to off-screen contributions. What is more, the way in which the media report this research is revealing – take this headline in the Daily Mail for example. Whilst it is a factual and balanced piece, the headline seems unnecessarily provocative.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8834021/BAME-people-represented-TV-new-research-suggests.html

15. Peleton ‘workouts for the family’

After its disastrous Christmas 2019 ad with its deeply disturbing and almost dystopian take on what drives a woman to exercise, Peleton had some work to do. Their 2020 ad is a much ‘safer’ showing and at the very least begins to demonstrate some of the features and benefits of the brand. It stops short of having nailed a true emotional benefit, but it’s a step in the right direction. Great choice of soundtrack too!

https://www.lbbonline.com/news/peloton-christmas-ad-gets-whole-family-feeling-good-with-nina-simone

16. Covid-19 public broadcasting

Public broadcast messaging is tricky stuff. In the early part of the pandemic, the government’s messaging reflected best-practise – simplicity of message, easy to understand and recall, consistently delivered through targeted media. The same can’t be said of the public messaging as government advice has changed. Had the campaign attempted to find a unifying theme higher-up the benefit ladder from the outset, the shifting sands at a practical implementation level may have been more easily handled.

THE SAME OLD S***

17. People Per Hour ‘girl boss thing’

You can’t just take a cultural reference (#girlboss) and replay it without context. Need we say more?

18. Amazon’s advertising for cleaning products

Men clean too!

https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2020/10/amazon-attacked-over-sexist-ads-featuring-women-with-cleaning-products/

19. PC Specialist ‘the beginning of the end’

If only this campaign had lived-up to its title. When you focus only on product-level feature-benefit messaging, it’s easy to see how this brand could get locked into reflecting only one aspect of its potential audience. Just imagine how powerful PC Specialist could be in the gaming industry if it opened its offer to the other 50% of the population? It may be true that gamers are predominantly male, but it’s a changing market and an opportunity missed.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-01-08-pc-specialist-ad-banned-for-perpetuating-harmful-gender-stereotypes

20. Netflix ‘cuties’

When Netflix created an English language poster for the French-language film, Mignonnes (which has been translated as ‘The Cuties’), here’s what they went with…. (compared with the Bac Films theatrical poster for the same film).

Any shockers you want to share? We'd love to hear from you.