Conference Feature: the Love of Branding

At last week's MRS conference, News Editor Mel Crowther sat in on a session dubbed 'the Holy Trinity of Love: TV, Telecoms and Toilet Tissue'.


Love and Lenses

When we fall in love, we go to great lengths to make things work, according to opening speaker Nick North, CMO of GfK Media. This includes accepting our partners' faults, working to get to know them better and using their language to communicate.

Clearly, there's something special about feelings which would make us normally antisocial beings go to such lengths - and perhaps marketers could learn from them? In recent studies, North said GfK has sought to understand these feelings better by measuring not just what people feel and think about the programmes they watch, but the 'thrills' they gain from viewing a favourite drama, or the humour they experience when watching a comedy which makes them laugh.

North says these emotions are similar to those experienced when 'in love', and since love has been shown to drive stronger buying intent, this 'desire' becomes more intense when advertising is placed alongside those programmes that respondents prefer.

North recommends looking at respondents through the 'lens of love'. Making advertising relevant and specific to them, personalising content, using their language and rewarding them will help to tap into these very strong emotions. His advice to media owners is to use the fact that consumers engage with media content to ensure that advertising's creative content also resonates.


Love and Loyalty

In contrast, broadband provider Talk Talk has to deal with customers who are somewhat ambivalent about its brand. Word-of-mouth (WOM) trends can be fairly negative in the broadband category because people tend not to discuss their service until they have a bad experience. So, no love there then.

Anna Willas from Spring Research and her client Catherine Russell from Talk Talk Group described how they threw out traditional brand research models and instead focused on understanding the drivers of customer advocacy.

Talk Talk's customers tend to be older and less-influenced by WOM conversations, although they do listen to reassurance from friends or colleagues.

As love wasn't on the agenda, Spring Research and Talk Talk agreed to put in place a programme of social media analysis - or 'WOM on steroids' as they described the channel - to uncover where customer emotions actually dwell.

Conversations taking place were categorised as the 4As - anecdotal, based on experience; advisory from those who hadn't necessarily had a previous experience with the brand; anonymous from review sites; or ardent - the gold standard from those who are emotionally engaged.

Talk Talk is now using these findings to trigger customer communications at specific times around themes such as costs savings, while also informing the company how best to word them.


Love and Lavatories

Finally, human communications expert Rachel Lawes from London-based Lawes Consulting provided an insight into the complexities of re-branding the popular toilet paper brand Charmin.

In 2007, P&G exited the toilet tissue category and sold three of its brands to Lawes' client SCA Tissue, with the proviso that SCA would cease using the 'equity' from the brands within three years.

The options were limited: try to move the newly acquired brands to the firm's existing portfolio, or create a new brand from scratch.

One of the brands - Charmin - had a market value of £91m, and an army of loyal consumers who loved the very strong imagery of the Charmin Bear and were very unhappy about the prospect of change.

Advertisers use displacement mechanisms to make the concept of toilet paper seem more acceptable to our delicate western sensibilities. Puppies, bears, children, babies are all deemed as acceptable examples of displacement mechanisms.

So, as P&G had insisted SCA change all Charmin's recognisable assets, Lawes Consulting needed to help its client find a new brand with a different displacement mechanism. One that would be received well by existing consumers.

A number of possible alternatives were debated, including the lion, which was considered to be too aggressive; the seal, which didn't have much personality or semiotic heritage; and the panda, which had a history of being used to represent endangered species. However, the koala was seen as being just right - cuddly, not overly intellectual, and without fangs!

Then, when it came to finding a new name for the re-branded product, a range of words were considered such as 'Softness', which was seen as being linguistically too similar to Charmin; 'Cushin', which was associated with the sitcom Only Fools and Horses, and 'Cuddlesoft', which was regarded as babyish. Eventually, the word 'Cushelle' ticked a lot of the right boxes. It begins with the letter 'c', has a soft sounding letter 'l' on the end, and, in common with Charmin, is recognisably French.

Consumers said the newly launched Cushelle still felt like 'their' brand and P&G approved it as being totally distinct from the former branding.

Upon roll out in 2010, SCA expected a 20% decline in sales and anticipated it would take three to four years to recover - as had happened to another of its re-branded products. But instead, Cushelle witnessed a sales increase during the period.

So, whether a consumer is considering a new broadband supplier or selecting their favourite toilet paper, it would seem that love plays a key part in that choice.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.