Advertising Works Article

I was honoured to be invited to write an introductory chapter for Volume 19 of Advertising Works, here. The title isn't one I would have chosen and I thought I should really play it a little safe with it. The resulting article is steady if unspectacular. Good enough to print but hardly the stuff to cause a tidal wave in advertising thinking. Though if a couple of people in the next recession look it up and have a read, then I'll be pleased.

It's a shame I can't lift the article directly from the book, as it looks way more impressive in a £130 500+ page hard cover book, especially with a photo of me in!


Chapter 2

Learnings for the next recession

By Christian Barnett

Planning Director, Coley Porter Bell

It’s a bit tough being asked to think about learnings for the next recession, in part because we’re not completely clear of this one yet – double dip and all that – but also because no two recessions are quite the same. They have different causes, different effects and different remedies. My current favourite fact is that, on average, people had more disposable income in 2009 than 2008, which seems at first sight, a little counter-intuitive.

However, it is fair to assume in the next economic downturn marketing budgets will be put under more pressure, that demonstrating return on investment will be even more important, and that creativity, channel selection and mix, and targeting –be it demographic, attitudinal or behavioural – will all be under increased scrutiny.

And, in a rather perverse way, perhaps the brand and communications industries should look forward to it. Recessions put us on our mettle, force us to look at, and justify, the value of what we do all the more keenly and force us to be more innovative. Tough economic conditions should, in theory, expose the lazy and wasteful and reward the skilful and brave.

There is already some excellent literature around about advertising during a downturn.* The main theme is that of the crucial important of the relationship between share of voice and share of market. In practical terms this meant bolstering advertising expenditure in times where the natural inclination is to cut it and realizing that recessions are great times to buy share of voice, and thus market share, because competitors retreat and media rates fall.

However, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of reviewing creative strategies, so I thought it might be useful to look at the different approaches taken in this recession to draw some generalised rules for the future, and use some of this year’s winning papers to provide examples.

*‘Advertising during a recession’ Alex Biel and Stephen King, Chapter 9 in Advalue, IPA, 2003, and Advertising in a Downturn, IPA, 2008, ‘How share of voice builds market share’, IPA 2009 and ‘The link between creativity and effectiveness’ IPA 2010 for example.


The big emotional idea

When brands are under pricing pressure, reinforcing the emotional bond with the consumer is a time-honoured way of maintaining value in the brand. It sounds easy, but requires a real appreciation of how the brand fits into the emotional landscape of its audience.

The Heinz paper, ‘Maintaining leadership in uncertain times’ does just this, showing a deft understanding of the brand and its role in British life to rejuvenate emotional affinity and purchase. The ‘It has to be Heinz’ campaign drove a strong emotional response that helped rebuild core equity, and due to the renewed loyalty rebuilt the sales and share that had been in decline due to Heinz loyalists drifting away from the brand.

In contrast, the Cadbury Dairy Milk paper doesn’t seek to show how the brand is integrated deftly into our lives. Instead it carves out confidently a whopping big emotional territory, a far cry from the previous ‘persuasive’ Dairy Milk advertising model. The big leap was to make people feel the same joy as they might get from a bar of Dairy Milk rather than tell people. In essence Cadbury Dairy Milk stopped being a ‘manufacturer of chocolate and became a producer of joy’. Though not a recession-specific paper it certainly gives us lessons in one way to respond to an economic downturn. The campaign has increased key measures of ‘love’ (involvement) and ‘fame’ (salience) and improved price elasticity, with less reliance on price promotions, and a greater return on investment.

Leveraging brand heritage

In tough times we look to brands we trust. Drawing upon a brand’s heritage is one way to remind us of the brand as a rock. Indeed, there was a spate of ‘heritage’ campaigns that aired in late 2008/early 2009. Guinness, Colgate, Milky Bar, Persil and Lego all rebroadcast old ads, Walker’s relaunched Monster Munch, Mars repackaged Starburst as Opal Fruits and, in an act that combined the old and the new, Cadbury reintroduced the defunct Wispa brand after a campaign on Facebook calling for its return. A limited edition turned into a permanent relaunch which in its first week was the best-selling chocolate bar in the UK, and managed to sustain its success as online engagement grew. The paper shows a glorious mash-up of a heritage brand reborn and sustained by the power of today’s social media.

Two other award winners stand out in this area. Firstly, Virgin Atlantic, that celebrated its 25th anniversary in style by going back to the 1980s with a big TV ad. In an industry that took a significant hit due to the recession, Virgin Atlantic, not for the first time, zigged whilst other zagged, and instead of slugging it out in the gutter on price took to the skies with a big brand piece which drove top-line revenue.

Secondly, Hovis, with its epic TV ad ‘As good today as it’s ever been’ depicting a young lad running home with a loaf of Hovis through various scenes from the last 122 years, is perhaps the most obvious example of a brand drawing upon its heritage. Not only did the film take us on a journey through the times that brand has been with us, but did so with the atmosphere, style and equities that evoked the brand’s most famous past moments. Though not created directly in response to the recession, its timing couldn’t have been better – it launched just as the downturn hit – so much so, that it didn’t just tap into the prevailing zeitgeist but helped define it.


Innovative thinking and value

Recessions put significant pressure on premium brands andit takes skill and dexterity to walk the tightrope of demonstrating value without compromising hard- earned brand values. The retail sector provides us with two excellent examples of how smart innovative thinking can relieve the pressure from mid-market and discount predators looking to lure the more value-driven shoppers away from the premium stores.

Waitrose took the opportunity to create a coherent own label range, ‘Essential Waitrose’ by bringing its disparate offering together under one new sub-brand. The range itself was simple and elegant, in keeping with the Waitrose style, and the communications effort was underpinned by the line: ‘Quality you’d expect at prices you wouldn’t.’ The ‘Essentials’ rebrand helped prevent shoppers from switching out of the brand, built loyalty amongst Waitrose shoppers and delivered a considerable return on investment.

Sainsbury’s was fearful that the good work done in 2007 with the ‘Try something new today’ campaign, would be undone in 2008 as the credit crunch took hold, food inflation gathered pace and Sainsbury’s could be perceived as too expensive. ‘Feed your family for a fiver’ was an idea that offered Sainsbury’s quality for great value in difficult times. The price point was delivered by standard prices and not special offers or discounts. It produced the best recognition score for any Jamie Oliver TV ad tracked to date, was recalled as well as Tesco’s longer-standing ‘Every little helps’, and delivered over £500m in sales in two years.

The ‘baddies’ do their bit

This is a tricky area, and probably worth a more detailed analysis elsewhere, but it seems to me that brands, like celebrities, who bury their head in the sand on difficult matters that directly concern them generally don’t enhance their reputations. Some sort of communication (ideally with corrective action) is necessary and it seems to be the only way to try to find some redemption. Whether it succeeds is another matter. So it is interesting to find a number of financial papers in this year’s awards. The two most pertinent are the Lloyds TSB’s ‘For the journey’ and the Barclays’s ‘Take one small step’ as they directly address the recession. Both take the line of offering a helping hand. Lloyds TSB, which had to face considerable public anger over pay and bonuses after the government bail-out and saw an accompanying dip in consideration, avoided any temptation to change campaign and saw the value of sticking with the ‘For the journey’ theme.A new ‘How we’re helping’ message reminded customers that the heart of the business was in the High Streets of the country and not the Square Mile. Consideration started to rise again.

Barclays too, offered some practical help, with their ‘Take one small step’ campaign. In a climate where customers were feeling powerless, the intent was to help them manage their money better and feel in control of their finances again. This was done by encouraging people to adopt relatively small but achievable behaviours. The campaign took a series of needs and matched it with a Barclays product or service. It successfully shifted attributes like ‘offers helpful products and services’ and ‘helps me manage my money better’ and delivered a hefty return on investment.


Behavioural economics

Perhaps the most interesting of the approaches, as it is a relatively new area of thought, is that of the application of behavioural economics. It seems to be ideally suited to how brands and communications respond to recessions. The notion of many ‘small’ choices and decisions having a bearing upon eventual outcomes seems well-adapted to a marketing environment – with huge permutations of touchpoints; consumer journeys that are no longer predictable nor sequential; increasing emphasis on targeted digital engagement; and demanding greater accountability.

The Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) paper, ‘Best in class: how influencing behaviour with a new media strategy helped nudge teacher recruitment to record levels’ is a superb exposition of this new type of thinking.

The issue was the shrinking pool of quality applicants entering teacher training and in particular, the number of ‘career switchers’ was declining faster than applications in general. For someone already in a career, switching to become a teacher is a big decision. In addition, progress towards becoming a teacher for career switchers wasn’t linear or mechanical. Instead their behaviour was full of stops and starts, emotional and logical, decisive and uncertain. The communications strategy is best described as a pinball machine, keeping the applicant ‘in play’, and nudging them towards an application.

It may not be that all decision processes are this complex or long-winded. For example, deciding on which brand of bread to pick off the shelf may not require the same thought process as changing careers. Yet, there will be broad lessons and principles of thinking that apply to any scenario where communication is trying to overcome a behaviour barrier, or set of them. Understanding the interplay between triggers, barriers, decisions (and non-decisions), message and media helps us construct communications in a way that should lead to better and more effective outcomes.

The one thing I found disappointing was that there wasn’t more thinking like the Teacher Recruitment paper. There were other submissions that borrowed some of the language of behavioural economics, and certainly demonstrated how they have used communications to shift behaviour. But this paper really got under the skin of how messaging and media could help nudge people. Given that some of the big discussions in the industry over the last decade – fragmentation of media, digital communication and now behavioural economics – all seem to intersect at a point that would have proved very useful in recessionary times, I am surprised that this type of approach was not used more. Perhaps by the next recession we will have learnt how to better apply all this good stuff we have been talking about for a while.

I don’t pretend these themes are exhaustive, or that they are exclusively for recessions. But judging by what has worked over the last couple of years, the papers and themes outlined above might be a reasonable place to start some thinking the next time around.

We are fortunate that we have fantastic resources such as the IPA Databank, www.ipa.idol.co.uk and other specific IPA papers, to draw upon in difficult times. Recessions are tough for many industries, including ours, and the wealth of data we have available helps us to strengthen and prove our case for investment in harder times, and in so helping our own business through helping our clients.