Advertising Week Europe: Are all brands challengers now?

In this episode, Adam and Laura reflect on their recent experiences at Advertising Week Europe.

At AWE, Laura interviewed previous podcast guest Katie Evans, CMO of Burger King UK, about the Bundles of Joy campaign before Adam and Laura attended talks with brands including Jaguar and Vaseline.

This episode draws together the big themes from the conference including: the growing prevalence of brands adopting a challenger mindset, meeting consumers at their level with authenticity, and thinking about the entire consumer context to create value.

CREDITS:

Katie Evans on The Persuasion Game: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0UpvX4gTogiL7sUE0igZi4

Nick Graham on The Persuasion Game: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3AMSb9808W9MuBzAr9vUyb

Nick Manning and Caroline Marshall on The Persuasion Game: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2TWHtg8o8MDcnx9P4vK546?si=1I5r5OfcRxer5lUENJJ72Q

Burger King Bundles of Joy ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFX6lHi6SZs

Jaguar: https://www.jaguar.co.uk/copy-nothing/index.html

Cole Walliser, Glam Bot: https://www.instagram.com/colewalliser/?hl=en

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn for updates.

Subscribe to The Persuasion Game Newsletter on LinkedIn.

Want to know more about us? Visit our website here: thisistheforge.com

This is an 18Sixty production for Forge.

The Persuasion Game is available on all your favourite podcast apps: https://link.chtbl.com/PersuasionGame

Transcript

Adam: This is the Persuasion Game, the Forge’s podcast all about the art of persuasion. Each episode we connect with marketers, business leaders, and beyond to learn how they use persuasion to influence their customers, convince their stakeholders, and drive their businesses forward.

Adam: Hey Laura, how are you?

Laura: I’m very good, Adam. How are you doing?

Adam: Yeah, I’m very well, thank you. You must be flying high after your talk with Katie Evans at Advertising Week this week.

Laura: It was a very busy week. Yes. Friend of the pod, Katie Evans from Burger King, very kindly asked us to continue the conversation that we started on the pod a few weeks ago. And we spoke specifically at Advertising Week with her telling the audience about the Bundles of Joy campaign — which was the delivery service advertisement that showed new moms really enjoying a big burger and the kind of reaction to that. It was a great conversation. It’s very different, isn’t it? Like speaking to a room where you can see people’s faces versus just speaking into a mic.

Adam: Well, I was in the audience and you both did brilliantly and it was a packed out room, wasn’t it? There were lots of people there very interested in that campaign. Very well attended talk. And to be honest with you, I was sat near the front row and when you popped the advert up on the screen, I got a bit emotional. I was a little bit worried that I’d be sat there in a room full of advertisers with tears in my eyes, but I managed to hold it together.

Laura: It still makes me wince, the ad, to be honest with you, but that’s for my own personal reasons. No, it was really interesting and yes, it was incredibly well attended and Katie spoke hyper-articulately. And one of the reasons we wanted to carry on the conversation about what we heard today was I think Katie touched on something that was really interesting and what I saw a lot of the room really engaging with — and that was the idea of everybody having to think like a challenger now. Obviously when you go to something like Advertising Week, the best and the brightest are being asked to speak about the leading edge and where the conversation is going. So it’s all sorts of different perspectives, but what was really striking was that was a theme that we heard from a number of brands, wasn’t it?

Adam: It was. Yeah. I mean I attended the Jaguar talk which was again very well attended for obvious reasons. The Managing Director of Jaguar shared the reasons why Jaguar rebranded in the way that they did, but a lot of what he was saying was about wanting to challenge the status quo, do things differently. For a huge business like Jaguar with its production lines of cars coming off, in order to behave like a challenger it required some very significant changes to what they’re doing — both on the brand front but also business model wise.

Laura: Yeah, it’s really interesting. You could reflect on the different reasons that that has started to happen. Jaguar obviously have their own specific reasons which they talked everyone through, but I think what it tapped into is something that Nick Manning was talking to us about — which was the whole change of media landscape has meant that it’s not business as usual for brands anymore. We look at the kind of way that brands are communicating with people. Platforms have really made a very uniform world where it doesn’t really matter if you’re the biggest brand — you still have a much more fragmented audience, a much more inverted relationship with that audience. So it’s trying to meet them on their level rather than talking down and giving one uniform message.

Adam: Gone are the days of the big cultural moment where a brand can launch its advert, everybody sees it, everybody’s talking about it. You really have to now work your way into the conversation in a much more authentic and meaningful way.

Laura: Precisely. And also I think it plays into the fact that one your voice is not as amplified as a brand, but perhaps your voice is not as trusted. We see things like the Edelman report every year — whilst brands are more trusted than governments, it is declining year on year. And brands are really having to communicate in a way that earns that trust and authenticity and right to speak, rather than just saying “behold, I’ve proclaimed my latest campaign to you all.”

Adam: If it doesn’t feel real, then people are much quicker now to switch off and not listen.

Laura: Yes, absolutely. And even things like measuring clickthrough and engagement — you can see that so much of what we do engage with is very very surface level. So it really gave evidence to this idea that we need to find a way to communicate with people in a way that’s actually meaningful to them. And I think it’s also about meeting people where they are and using that as a springboard — using people themselves and where they are, insight to create something relevant rather than deciding you were going to create a culture.

Adam: Yeah. And I think the other thing that’s really interesting about Burger King and Jaguar is when you consider the awareness of both of those businesses — everyone knows about Burger King, everyone knows about Jaguar — and their big challenge is about consideration. How do they get people to reappraise the products or services being offered and take them up? Yes, everyone knows about Jaguar. There’s a huge number of people who would desire a Jaguar, but there just aren’t enough of them to actually sustain a business. There’s not enough of those people who are actually buying the cars. And so part of the rebrand is identifying an audience that they do believe will be able to buy the cars. And in order to get to them, they needed to rebrand what Jaguar is all about — all the way through to the actual cars that come off the production line.

Laura: It’s a really interesting exemplar, but you hear about it so much from all sorts of FMCG brands as well. Brands that everyone would consider a household name saying “we have really high awareness, really high brand perceptions — does it actually drive conversion? Does it actually make a difference in terms of what people pay?” No, not really. And it’s that bigger point, I guess, that taps into private label growth or just the sense of there being a lot more choice — people really needing to speak to people in a way that converts, drives reappraisal, makes people really want to buy into the proposition because they feel like it’s for them.

Adam: Yeah. And Katie talked to us about this on the podcast and again during the talk — the way that they did that through the Bundles of Joy campaign was to grab attention with a specific group of people, women, and let them really feel that intense hunger that they have felt. And it’s not saying the only time to buy Burger King is after you’ve given birth — I guess they wouldn’t sell many burgers that way. Um, but it’s about when you have that intense craving for food or you really want to feel satisfied, then the Burger King promise of food can satisfy that. And secondary to that, they were also talking about their delivery service — which I hadn’t actually noticed, to be completely honest. What’s quite interesting about that campaign is it was so much about reappraisal of the burgers that the actual purpose of the advert — which was to tell everyone about the delivery service — you could actually see it or not see it.

Laura: Yeah. It is completely different, isn’t it? Because I was in brand management 20 years ago, to my horror, and it was so focused on measuring “has your campaign objective been delivered.” And now that feels just so quaint, because one — you would never have a season of a campaign, it would be always on all the time — but two, the idea that you weren’t using that to push your brand forward, it was all about that specific variant or specific new format — it just feels so sweet really. Like, did you really think people were just going to buy your brand for the sake of it? People are really having to work hard to keep pushing that brand consideration button all the time. And it is creating some really powerful work that genuinely engages people very emotively. Katie had some great things to say about that. Over to Katie.

Katie Evans: You have ways to get there, but equally you need to yes be part of that consideration, become a favourite. And obviously your strategy is built around how do we do that? How do we cut through, especially in a very noisy category and a category where there’s a huge amount of investment in media. We don’t necessarily have that same budget. So it’s all about how do we find ways to cut through? How do we find interesting and differentiated ways to engage our consumer?

Adam: So we’re talking about challenger brands here. Brands that are trying to get into the discourse, influencing behaviour or challenging people to reappraise the product and consider it. But you can’t just jump into any conversation, can you? You’ve got to be quite specific about where you’re showing up and the types of conversation that you want to be a part of.

Laura: It’s so right and that’s the paradox really, isn’t it? Because I think there was also in the rooms we heard a sense that perhaps people had jumped a bit blindly into certain topics, particularly when purpose was the catch-all for what gave you meaning. I definitely heard a lot of comments about how Pride was perhaps something that people bandwagoned on a little bit, and it’s been really interesting to see who’s stuck with that and who hasn’t. And it all gives even more focus to where should you be playing. If you’re going to have to be really wholehearted and throw yourself in with a distinctive point of view, you need to be really judicious about where your right to play is and think about — can another brand do it better?

That was a really interesting point that Katie made actually — sometimes you shouldn’t be thinking about could someone else in my category do it better, it’s “is there another brand persona that does it better?”

Adam: She mentioned Specsavers

Laura: Yeah, really fun and really dynamic in a lot of spaces. So don’t try and be the meal version of Specsavers, find your own right to play. Because obviously you would think it would be all about the other quick service restaurants.

Adam: Yeah. And I think that really taps into a lot of the things that Roden Glover, the Jaguar MD, was saying — which is that they were trying to tap into a mindset, the mindset of who the future consumer might be of these new cars. And that was part of the reason why they launched at Miami Art Week and not a car show. They were looking for celebrities, people that are leading culture. They were looking for people that could afford to buy fine art and who really appreciated an aesthetic and design. So they teased the brand and then launched it into Miami Art Week as the first big reveal. That was really quite interesting when you think about the conversation they wanted to enter and how to reposition where they sit.

Laura: A reframe

Adam: Totally. Yeah.

Laura: It was similar with talking to Katie about the research they did for Burger King, because obviously the route you would traditionally take when launching a campaign is focus groups with people who were fans of Burger King but had low awareness of delivery. And what she said very fervently — and I really support her on this — was your idea will die if you test it that way. A really big bold idea like that won’t serve you well because it won’t be meeting the standard parameters of success and it will be controversial for some people and some people will not endorse that mindset, that way of thinking.
So what they actually did was they went to Mumsnet and ran research in partnership with them, which was really about understanding what is authentic portrayal of hunger — how did you actually feel, what’s the reality? And I think it’s just such a different way of looking at the role that we can play as well. Rather than saying “this is standardised and validated,” it’s actually about enhancing and tapping into a wider space, a wider conversation — where you seek to build your information from or where you seek to land your story, right.

Adam: Both leaders we listened to really leaned into this idea that it’s not going to be for everyone. Some people are not going to like this. And having heard both of them speak, I’m just so inspired by the way that they can release something into the wild and then just wait and see what happens, rather than jumping in and trying to fix things or change things immediately.

Roden talked about — obviously we all know what happened with the Jaguar launch. It got quite nasty in some places. I think it ended up with some of the individuals working at Jaguar being put in the Daily Mail and kind of singled out.

Laura: The Daily Mail would do that to someone. Can’t believe it.

Adam: And there was a point where they had to intervene in the conversation, but they only did it just to emphasise a point which they felt needed to be emphasised — which was that it’s always been in Jaguar’s spirit to challenge convention and challenge the status quo. So there’s something really important there — if you are going to enter the conversation, it’s entering it like a conversation, listening to the answer, and not just trying to control it totally.

Laura: Yeah, I enjoyed hearing Katie talk about that as well, because I was always really struck by Burger King’s ability to just let the conversation be. There was a really strong response and interesting language — people saying “they should be ashamed of themselves” — and actually not falling into your basest instincts to reply and go “I’m not ashamed of myself, this is a great campaign.” To really sit with that and then see the response, which was actually from mums and midwives and people who had real experiences saying “this works for me, I feel seen.” I think the way she phrased it was “we had said what we had to say on it and then it was over to someone else.

Adam: It’s pretty clear what we had to say on the matter, so why say anything more?” And I think that was the difference between that campaign and the Jaguar one — there was a slight lack of clarity on the Jaguar side from people saying “you’re changing everything, this is not Jaguar.” And he was like “well actually if you go back through the history books, we have consistently pushed the envelope in terms of changing things and doing things that people weren’t going to expect.”

Laura: Yeah, that’s interesting. I think it’s all to do with your appetite for risk of how stuff is received. And Katie talked a lot about the fact that because they have always been a challenger, this is not the first time they’ve done something that was a little bit edgy as a team. They have a really strong working relationship that balances risk and trust. I can imagine with Jaguar, as you say — things coming off the line, huge iconic British brand — there’s probably a lot more nervousness about setting the tone and managing the conversation.

And to be honest, even hearing the talk from Vaseline, that felt similar. They were very keen to enter a modern cultural conversation. They knew they weren’t just being experienced on TV — they knew they were being experienced on TikTok and that the product was being used in various different ways. But what was striking was they were moving into that space but doing it in a much more curated way than perhaps some other brands were. They were saying “we’re going to observe the top 100 uses of Vaseline and we’re going to cherry-pick 30.”

Adam: I was worried then for a second.

Laura: Yeah, don’t worry. And then it was all about them bringing their science, their technology to prove or disprove if something was working. That was an interesting middle ground, I thought — because yes, it was them being authentic. They even had their own scientists saying “this is Vaseline-verified as a strategically good use.” And they were tapping into interesting cultural things — like, I don’t know if you saw the Oscars, but the Glambot?

Adam: I don’t know. I didn’t see

Laura: this is the difference between cats and dogs. Like I know nothing about Jaguar but I could talk to you about the Glambot at the Oscars.

Adam: I want to know more!

Laura: It was basically a camera that took a shot of people as they came in but it moves incredibly quickly, and the image you get is almost luminescent — like real old-style Hollywood images, like putting Vaseline on the lens way back when. So they’re doing a partnership with the person that invented it — I think his name is Cole Wallissa. Very cool, I suggest you give him a follow. But yeah, a lot more curated, a bit more safe, but still dipping your toe into the conversation that is being led by consumers.

Adam: No, I really like that. It’s a different approach, isn’t it? It’s not “let’s create the conversation,” it’s “here’s a conversation that’s already going on about our brand and about use cases for it — why wouldn’t we have a role in this conversation?” To talk about “Yeah, these thirty or forty use cases, we’d stand up to – but some of these things are pretty weird…  

Laura: And which I think also taps into the fact that they are quite a medical brand, right? They’re about safety and they’re about healing. It would be a bit weird if they suddenly were like “have at it, do all of the things.”

So when Katie was talking about the need to explore differently, to get a feeling for if an idea might work outside of the usual focus group or quant study, it did make me think of the conversation we had with Nick when he was talking about his experiences at Pepsi and getting that intuitive feeling that something either was or wasn’t working. One of the examples he gave was great — he had a feeling that people were saying they loved Pepsi but it wasn’t linking back to distribution. And when he actually looked at the drawings that people had done, it was all 1970s logos. It just made me think — you need to have this inkling for where something might be interesting. Let’s hear what Nick said.

Nick Manning: I remember sitting in a focus group with one of our senior leaders, watching some of our core consumers — we’re just testing out some different directions for packaging. And we had this logo design that was very similar, certainly reminiscent of the old logo, and you just saw people go “oh my god, this is like the old logo.” And you could feel the energy in the room — when you’re in a piece of qualitative research, you can feel the energy go up.

Adam: So in the instance of Bundles of Joy with Katie, I can imagine showing that film to certain people — some having a visceral “I’m not really into this,” others really going “this is amazing.” And at that point you have to take the call. Okay, there’s very strong emotion here. None of it’s really going to derail Burger King per se, but actually because of the strength of opinion, it’s going to create a really interesting conversation and there’s going to be some people that are really advocating for it.

Laura: So you’ve got to be all in on that, haven’t you?

Adam: Yeah.

Laura: And on the subject of being all in — I was fascinated by the fact that Jaguar are not producing new cars until this lands. Is that right? They’re shuttered?

Adam: Yes. Because they’re transitioning from petrol and diesel to electric vehicles, they are effectively turning off all of their factory lines, shutting down all production on the existing models and relaunching the brand in the interim before bringing out the new cars. Which is, you know, textbook marketing 101 — establish your brand, work out your target audience, consider your positioning, how you’re going to land it, and then move into the products rather than do the products first and try and figure out your brand later. However, in the reality of running a car manufacturer, it’s extremely bold and brave. This is going to be a fascinating case study to watch back over time.

Laura: It will be so interesting. This is one that is going to be in the textbooks one way or the other. I’m tempted to say it might work. Having listened to the strategy and the insights and the way that they’re going about it, it feels like — as crazy as it initially sounded — it is strategically quite sound.

Adam: I mean, you’ve got to consider it — Jaguar is part of a portfolio which includes Land Rover, which is absolutely flying by every single metric you can imagine. And Jaguar is working out what its place in that portfolio is. So they’re now trying to pivot into a new category, taking the bits of the brand with them that they feel can serve them there, but being totally okay with shedding the bits that are going to bring baggage rather than something positive.

Laura: Yeah, that was the lovely bit, wasn’t it? Talking about tapping into your heritage in a way that is meaningful. Because I think it is so tempting with new platforms to almost throw the baby out with the bathwater — “this is all really difficult, we’ve got to have a completely different way of talking to people.” And it does sort of become a bit like that Steve Buscemi “hello fellow kids” — everyone’s just trying to be cool rather than actually being who they really are.
And I think that was what was really interesting to reflect on — for Katie, it wasn’t a crazy attempt to create controversy. BK have always been a challenger. They’ve always looked for interesting spaces to tap into. They’ve always been about real food hunger and that met the need — and that was why they were confident to do it. Similarly with Jaguar, they would argue this is an evolution of what they’ve always been talking about.

Adam: Yeah. And also to your point about being all in — I don’t think they can achieve what they’re trying to do without being all in. You can’t half-do a really crazy rebrand. You’ve got to fully go for it.
The really interesting thing for me about Jaguar is — Roden would argue that yes, a lot of the business is changing, yes they’re moving from petrol to electric, yes the look of the cars is going to be different, they’ve got a crazy new colour palette, they’re mixing in different circles. But actually he would argue that the original brand heritage — the ethos around “copy nothing” — is exactly what they’re doing. They’ve existed in a car category which is all starting to look the same, and now they’re trying to do something completely different. And I think that’s really interesting — that actually your brand could just be about a thought or a behaviour rather than all the brand assets that we would normally associate with building a brand.

Laura: Yeah, that is so interesting actually, isn’t it? That it’s the ethos you’re going to hold on to rather than the distinctive brand assets. Because it’s kind of the opposite of a lot of the conversation we’ve been hearing, which is just be everywhere with the assets that people know. And it’s almost more like “tap into the spirit of the brand and see if you can use it to take you in a different direction.”

Adam: So just thinking about these three examples, you could put them on a sliding scale, couldn’t you? At one end you’ve got Jaguar, which is completely transforming its entire business, its business model, its customers — everything is up for grabs, and they are pulling through a kind of ethos as their north star. Kind of in the middle you’ve got Burger King, who are looking to start and push conversations and be in that conversation — Burger King for the last seven years since Katie has been there, looking to jump on the cultural conversation and push it. And actually what I find really interesting is Vaseline is also on this scale, but it’s just found a really unique way to insert itself into the conversation that already exists. So there’s a sliding scale about how big and bold you want to be.

Laura: Yeah.

Adam: And I think most brands can find somewhere on this scale to fit in.

Laura: The interesting thing from the Vaseline talk was I don’t think they actually felt particularly at an advantage in this conversation. There is an argument to make that if you’re a challenger, it’s kind of easier to make these bigger and bolder plays. But it’s a necessity to evolve your brand and to identify the spaces in which you can hold on to your heritage but go into something new. And as you say, they’ve chosen to do it in a slightly more curated way that’s authentic to them — a little bit more curated than perhaps the Jaguar approach, but still really brave.

I think the other thing that struck me is that if we think about the role of insights — people were looking to consumers but not through traditional metrics. They were looking to broader conversations beyond their categories. They were looking to different sources of information. They were looking to places where people are at their most authentic and candid and looking to express themselves in their wider context — not just as consumers of burgers or users of Vaseline. It really was about “what’s going on in your real life and how can we be part of that conversation?” And that can only be a really healthy thing for brands, to get them really adding value to people’s lives.

Adam: Yeah. They’ve almost zoomed out from individual consumers — “mum, 35 to 50, two kids” — to actually a conversation about culture. In all three examples it’s “how do we understand what cultural conversations are going on and how do we influence them and be part of them?” And in some of those brands’ cases, they’re looking to lead that cultural conversation — take Jaguar launching at Miami Art Week. And in others it’s “what interesting things are happening on TikTok and how can we be part of this?” I think it’s quite interesting thinking about consumers less as individuals but also about where the conversations are happening.

Laura: Absolutely. Well, it was great stuff.

Adam: Thanks for listening. If you’d love to hear more from marketers, entrepreneurs, and business leaders about how to use the art of persuasion to drive your business forward, then make sure you’re following the podcast in your favourite podcast app. And just one last ask from us — this is a new podcast and we’d love it if you could be persuaded to help us spread the word by telling somebody else about it, leaving us a review, or even better, sharing an episode on social media. Search The Forge on LinkedIn.