Cadbury's drum-playing gorilla is among many adverts whose long-term impact on sales is not commensurate with its huge impact as a ‘water-cooler hit’.
Tom Ellis of global branding agency 1HQ says that while a ‘viral’ hit can propel a brand briefly, durable success demands a broad-based branding strategy.
Speaking on a recent BusinessWings webinar, Ellis, who was brought to 1HQ last year from rival Big Green Door, cites McDonald’s as a prime example of a successful ad campaign buttressed by other innovations.
While the ‘I’m Lovin’ it’ campaign was hardly a YouTube sensation, it was blandly effective and, crucially, supplemented by other changes, such as store renovations, menu diversification and the extension of store hours. The approach was successful in rehabilitating a brand increasingly seen as unfashionable, environmentally unfriendly and culpable for the nation’s growing waistline.
Now, says Ellis, “they now sell more chicken and pre-prepped salad than anyone else. And – to use my acid test – their sales results have shown significant growth.”
Too often we look at these things from a 'wow that's amazing' perspective – but actually miss the point, which is to create sustainable sales, usually at a premium
Tom Ellis, 1HQ client development director of research and strategy
Having made its first quarterly loss in its history in 2002, the brand had recovered its poise by 2004, with year-on year profits increasing to 25% and sales reaching a 17-year high.
Longevity
“I would say the best brand campaign is the one that has sold most products,” says Ellis, perhaps stating the obvious and yet challenging the axiom that ‘buzz’ generation is all. “Too often, we look at these things from a 'wow, that's amazing' perspective, but actually miss the point, which is to create sustainable sales, usually at a premium. So I think the brand is about longevity, even if the product does sell itself to start.”
Cadbury’s Gorilla, which drummed to Phil Collins’ 'in the air tonight' and Dairy Milk chocolate bars were nowhere to be seen, was a major departure from the brand’s hitherto more product-centric advertisements and became a major viral hit. “The ad was loved,” reflects Ellis, who has worked with the company – “and yet Galaxy still outsold it.”
The correlation between popularity and product sales is not always clear-cut, as the success of the Go Compare tenor and ‘we buy any car’ jingle, two of the most irritating adverts ever, can attest.
A new – or rather old – breed of adverts is also often less effective than people might assume, according to Ellis’ colleague Claire Nuttall, who also attended the webinar.
Nuttall, insight and innovation director at 1HQ, says that brands that hark back to former incarnations – recent examples including Milky Bar’s revival of its 1970s animated car chase and Tetley reviving of the Tetley Tea Folk that were around in the 1980s – will enjoy only a “brief uplift” in fortunes, she argues.
“As we saw last year with the degree of social unease and uncertainty, some brands can make a quick return based on nostalgia, but not necessarily long term. Many brands on the nostalgia bandwagon experienced an uplift in performance, but this soon dropped back and the brand was again 'empty'.”
She adds: “Brands need to reframe and communicate in the most relevant way to those new audiences, not rely on the past. Reliance on past success alone is a sure recipe for failure.”
The trend for resurrecting old characters, jingles, slogans or logos is an inversion of another recent fashion for reinventing brands wholesale. Doomed rebrands like that of the Post Office, which quickly reversed its decision to rename itself Consignia following a backlash, or British Airways, which replaced the British flag on its tailfins with a series of ‘ethnic’ designs to much derision, perhaps led brand consultants to surmise that familiarity and nostalgia were powerful factors in people’s fondness for brands.
