Marketers don't need break old conventions; they need build new ones - it not semantics

By Matt Readman

To stand out from their competitors, marketers are told to be distinctive.

This often means breaking the conventions of the category. After all, how can you get a competitive advantage if you’re doing the same things.

This is not to say that conventions aren’t valuable. They act as a shortcut to what your product is and does. 

In a supermarket aisle for example, it is true that a busy shopper might well be attracted to a brand that is distinct from its competitors. It is also true however that the same customer can more easily recognise a product is if it looks like its competitors.This is why packaging conventions are so strong, and why packaging design that borrows from another category can go so wrong. 

In short then, breaking conventions helps a time-poor buyer choose between brands within a category, following conventions helps them understand what category the product is actually in.

This is why it’s scary to break category conventions. There is real jeopardy and at some point it will ultimately be an individual taking that risk. Like market research, conventions are comforting. I remember a client once telling me “but they must all [competitors] do it for a reason, it must work” without realising that perhaps this was exactly the same conversation every other client was having with their agency.

The truth is the language of breaking conventions isn’t helpful. It is too reactive. Too destructive. It feels like doing the opposite just for the sake of it. There is a danger we make things different but not better. 

Instead we should be talking about building conventions. It sounds like semantics, but in contrast to breaking, building feels proactive and constructive. It’s what a leader would do. 

We recently faced this conundrum with our work for Nestle Lindahls. Lindahls is a high-protein kvarg. It is a very difficult product to explain, and it sits within the fast-growing high protein category.  

It is a category however, with deeply engrained conventions. The market leader Danone HiPro helped reinforce these conventions; black packaging, intense workouts, indoor gyms satsified consumption moment. 

If Lindahls just broke these conventions for the sake of it they risked being mistaken for something else. If they copied conventions they would be crushed by the competition. The only way forward was to build new conventions.

Building new conventions means strategically keeping what you can’t afford to lose, but stretching into new areas.

For example, Lindahls kept the pot and lid packaging required to show it was a fresh dairy product, but instead of the intense black packaging of the high-protein world they used a poppy colour range to bring personality and lightness.

We wanted to build new conventions with our campaign too. We started with the core motivational insight. Marketing in the fitness world is based off external regulation. External regulation is the scientific way of saying you do exercise for certain rewards. It could be appearance or performance. But the message is clear: if you do this, you will achieve that. It is a very powerful form of motivation but it is also fickle. If expectation isn’t met, motivation collapses. It is also by no means the only form of motivation.

To build a new convention, we focused on another type of motivation - introjected regulation. This is the inner thought in your head. The guilt we feel when we don’t do something and the little burst of pride when we do make a good decision. This type of motivation is less intimidating, more empathetic and more human. 

The setting for our communications was different too. The indoor gym settings of the category never felt right for Lindahls and its Scandinavian provenance so we made sure all our storytelling was in the outdoors, showcasing more natural exercise like running.

The final major convention to challenge was the star of our ad. It’s hard to imagine a fitness ad without a lycra-clad aspirational protagonist. We’ve seen brands try to show more realistic or attainable subjects in fitness ads but never not actually show a real human.  

To create our story we used a plasticine stop-motion character. The advantages of this were numerous. It drastically reduced pressure on the casting of the role. Viewers didn’t need to see someone who looked like them to be able to connect. It meant that we could tell a longer story in a tiny amount of time. Finally the warmth, humour and humanity of the story meant the insight hit home.

Our campaign didn’t randomly break conventions, it built new ones. It didn’t try to be different, it tried to be better. 

We showed that motivation is more varied and complex than advertising often leads us to believe. We proved that protein doesn’t just belong in the gym. Finally, we showed that it is possible to create an even stronger emotional connection to a character, without even showing an aspirational model. 

Matt Readman is Chief Strategy Officer for Dark Horses