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Nurofen's Bigger Brand Purpose

In the past decade, everyday pharmaceutical brands have been increasingly creative in their advertising. Eye-catching images and witty metaphors brought cold functional products to life. However, advertising has continued to serve primarily as a colourful wrap for purely functional product offers, with literal visualisations of the problem remaining the typical advertising approach in the painkiller category. 

For all their inventiveness and humour, traditional painkilling adverts have essentially revolved around a straightforward dichotomisation of the problem (pain) and the solution (painkillers).

Last month, however, a completely new kind of painkiller brand emerged in the UK. Nurofen, the Reckitt Benckiser-owned range of pain-relief medication, launched an ad campaign promoting its new, bigger brand purpose: ‘For lives bigger than pain’.

There is no product shot, no promise, no explanation. This is pure lifestyle branding. At long last, the idea that a brand purpose can be bigger than a product offer has reached the pharmaceutical category.

Quarter-inch drills vs. quarter-inch holes

Problem-solver brands have always polarised around those that focus on the problem they address, and those that position themselves closer to lifestyle brands. This polarisation is particularly well illustrated by the contrasting approaches that Weight Watchers and Slim-Fast have taken in their recent advertising. Slim-Fast’s new campaign deftly glosses over the problem, solution and the prosaic, primary outcome (weight-loss) focusing instead on the titillating secondary outcomes that motivate women to loose weight in the first place.

Weight Watchers, meanwhile, keeps the emphasis firmly on the solution and primary outcome, promising only that Weight Watchers will help you lose weight because, put simply: ‘It works’.

But, whilst a simple ‘problem-solution’ advertising model can make sense in the weight loss category, where a brand such as Weight Watcher’s can genuinely claim to offer a qualitatively different solution (a points system as opposed to a meal replacement approach), its efficacy is less obvious in the pain killer sub-category. With only three types of painkillers available without prescription (paracetamol, aspirin, ibuprofen), few brands can legitimately claim a unique product offer and, as consumers’ medical savvy has increased, so has their awareness of this fact.

Nurofen couldn’t claim to offer a truly superior pain-relief solution, so instead it became a first painkiller to abandon its medical career, and search for new opportunities as a life coach.

Making people feel worthy when they feel weak is a truly powerful brand purpose, and it is surprising that, in such low differentiation category, others still persist in putting ‘body first’.

 

 

Good Enough to Eat: The Best Easter Packaging of 2013

Here at Bloom, we all enjoyed last weekend’s excuse to consume our body-weights in egg-shaped confectionary and I suspect we weren’t the only ones. According to a recent study reported in Confectionary News, Easter is primarily associated with chocolate for 62% of Brits (compared with just 12% who primarily associate it with Jesus).  

In the midst of our enthusiastic guzzling, however, we did come across a few Easter treats that were literally too good to eat. Here’s our round-up of 2013’s best Easter packaging: 

Best for Children: Smarties Hen House

The hen house’s window reveals a golden egg and a chocolate hen with an egg inside, adding a playful element of discovery to this innovative alternative to the traditional Easter Egg.   

Best for Grown-ups: Hotel Chocolat All Milk Collection

Hotel Chocolat’s All Milk Easter Collection added a rare touch of sophistication to this Easter’s offerings. The delicate, black, white and gold carousel box features a traditional Easter design dating back to the 1930s. The extra-thick egg it contains comes with a chocolate tablet embossed with the same scene. 

 Best of the Countline Treats: Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Chick With Easter Buttons.

Only the most cynical Easter shopper could resist this smiling chick. Better yet, unlike most countline Easter treats, this chick isn't hollow, but filled with Cadbury’s iconic Milky Buttons.

 Best for Traditional Fun and Games: Cadbury’s Easter Egg Trail Pack

Cadbury’s colourful, basket shaped trail pack provides you with all you need to construct your own Easter Egg hunt, for some nostalgic family fun. 

 

Best for Gourmands: Rococo’s Praline Quail Eggs and Salted Caramel Seagull Eggs

Rococo’s Praline Quail Eggs and Salted Caramel Seagull Eggs are ideal for those seeking up-market alternatives to the traditional hen’s egg. Nestled in tastefully rustic crates, the delicately speckled eggs could easily masquerade for the real thing.

 

Most Eco-Friendly: Elizabeth Shaw

Elizabeth Shaw’s Easter packaging was designed for minimal wastage. The egg did not even require any extra fixtures to position it, as the box was cleverly constructed to grip it in place.

 

Best Offering from a Non-Chocolate Brand: Rowntree’s Randoms

Colourful, exuberant and delightfully random, Rowntree’s packaging for its sweetie-filled egg was perfectly on-brand and, with no plastic window, it was eco-friendly too.

 

 

 

Riding High

There’s been a bit of a change in the reading material causing a stir in the Bloom office this week. Instead of the usual copies of Design Week and Creative Review, we’ve all been pouring over the April Issue of Horse & Rider. That’s because this month’s issue features our very own Account Director, Francesca Newman.

The six page feature shows Francesca, a seasoned competitor, demonstrating the tricky art of dressage riding. 

 

 

The evolution of the challenger brand paradigm

There is no doubt that Adam Morgan’s book “Eating The Big Fish”, first published in 1999, has had a profound impact on how we perceive the relationship between the underdog and the brand leaders. This seminal book was dramatic in its honesty about how precarious life is for the little fish in an environment utterly dominated by big fish. As a solution Morgan offered eight credos that were intended to be a compass with which these challenger brands could navigate and set new rules of engagement to disrupt the status quo and “eat the big fish.” 

In 2009 the second edition of “Eating The Big Fish” has evolved the term “challenger brand” into twelve different challenger stances from “The Irreverent Maverick” to “The People’s Champion.” Indeed the archetypal David vs. Goliath challenger stance, whereby a brand launches a directly positioned attack on the market leader with the intention of replacing it, is problematic as many brands today are adopting alternative routes to earn their challenger status. In addition, often when the little fish become the market leaders they gradually shed the values and ethics that propelled them into that position in the first place.

 

Dollar Shave Club demonstrates the evolution of the challenger model perfectly and falls into the category of the “Value Changer” - offering a proposition focused on superior value for money.

Despite being a tiny contender, Dollar Shave Club succeeded in muddying the clear waters of the shaving market when it launched its unconventional and entertaining YouTube video, which has achieved over six million views.

Although it is essentially challenging the shaving giant Gillette, at the heart of this company is a product that is sincerely valued. The brand achieves a distinct visual identity through the use of wooden imagery and a heritage-style seal to compliment its clubhouse theme, which differentiates it from the sleek and ultramodern razors produced by the rest of the category. As a result this is primarily a brand-led challenge that offers quality razors at a cheaper price and not simply a David vs. Goliath scenario.

Often successful challenger brands begin to face an identity crisis after they become leading players in their market and thereby outgrow their challenger positioning. Virgin Atlantic certainly demonstrated its challenger credentials when it dared to take on British Airways using its unconventional brand personality to agitate its conservative counterpart. Having earned a place as one of the best long-haul airlines, can Virgin still be considered a challenger brand? Virgin’s marketing trends certainly suggest that the brand has been loyal to its mischievous personality that propelled it into the position it is in today. 

Virgin’s 2009 “Still red hot” advert, which celebrated the business’ 25^th birthday, was launched during an economic downturn. At a time when the airline industry saw passenger numbers falling, Virgin deliberately swam against the prevailing cultural tide and increased its marketing spend. This gives credence to the argument that Virgin is still a challenger at heart, as it continues to adhere to its core values – that flying should be a pleasure, not a chore – even during a recession.

Apple is an exemplary challenger brand that dramatically ate the big fish, Microsoft. Yet it is arguably beginning to act like the very brand it set out to defeat. Recently Apple won a lawsuit against their rivals, Samsung, which saw a jury order the latter to pay the former $1 billion for patent infringement. This is not the behaviour of a challenger brand and is perhaps more symptomatic of a market leader wielding a club to protect its position.

The shift in the challenger brand paradigm is evident as brands seek new and innovative ways to disrupt the marketplace. In particular, brands are actively avoiding the formulaic David vs. Goliath scenario of a direct challenge to the market leader and are forging alternative routes instead. Moreover, if a challenger brand does become the market leader it must reconcile its new position with the core values that define it, or else it becomes an adaptation of the brand it set out to crush and ironically may suffer the same fate.

 

 

Live Advent Calendar

To celebrate Christmas at Bloom, this year we've decided to have a live advent calendar where each day someone would bring the Christmas cheer to Bloom.

As one might have imagined, much food was consumed and much cheer was had.

Here's a little snippet of all the activities...

 

We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a jolly good 2013.

We'll be back next year.