Brand Marketing and Promotion丨What’s wrong with Durex’s Mother’s Day poster?

Ever since the poster copywriting failures of Durex and Heytea, both the industry and readers have had a negative impression of Durex. With Mother's Day being a very important hot topic, everyone is keeping an eye on Durex's creativity. As a result, this issue's creative leverage has made things even worse for Durex's creative reputation, and it has been met with widespread criticism.

But objectively speaking, everyone is complaining about it being bad, so what is so bad about it? Can you point out what's wrong with it? Today we will analyze what is wrong!

Case Reproduction

Copywriter: You should have told me to listen to my mother.

Format: Poster series (as shown below)

User comments:

Case Study

1. Sorry, I don't understand what your poster is saying.

Many friends don’t understand what Durex’s poster means when they first see it. As a marketing product, this is the worst feedback possible.

As we all know, the essence of advertising marketing is the transmission of business information. The source of information is the merchant, and the recipient is the target audience. Therefore, there is no need to be mysterious, set up reading barriers, or think only from the creator's perspective.

The problem with Durex's poster this time is that when writing the copy, it only thought from the creator's perspective and completely ignored the target audience's understanding. Coincidentally, the same is true of another poster planned by Durex for Mother’s Day (as shown below). The words are understandable, but what they mean is completely incomprehensible.

Let’s take another counterexample: the Jingtian Baishuishan advertisement. Advertising serves businesses. In order to meet the so-called high-end demands of businesses, the works (advertisements) display the brand image in the minds of businesses. However, the business information was not delivered accurately, and the reception effect on readers (customers) was ignored. Readers (customers) did not even understand what it was, resulting in ineffective delivery. If customers can’t even understand the information, why should we expect them to play the role of disseminators of business information?

2. ha? Is this Durex? Didn't feel it at all

When you see Durex's poster, if no one tells you that it is a Durex poster, you will not associate it with Durex at all. Even if you are told, you will not know what it has to do with Durex.

This means that the brand characteristics are not obvious enough . What does it mean?

The most direct way is that if I change the Durex logo to the Lvmama logo, you will feel that there is no sense of incongruity and it feels just as appropriate.

When doing marketing through leveraging opportunities, many people pay too much attention to the exploration and application of themes, emphasizing the characteristics of the themes, but putting very little effort into the brand characteristics themselves. The resulting marketing products have few or even no brand characteristics. I call these products highly "universal."

The so-called universality is a concept I often mention, that is, between the theme elements and the brand characteristics, only one of them should be highlighted, and the other can be replaced by other content. For example: A few years ago, although the advertisement "No matter how big the world is, it's just a plate of scrambled eggs with tomatoes" caused widespread heated discussion, the correlation between the advertisement content and the brand was too low, making it impossible for people to remember or even know that it was China Merchants Bank.

Therefore, marketing products that overemphasize the theme and ignore the brand characteristics are nothing more than a passing cloud for the audience, and do not create any memorable points for the brand at all.

Brand characteristics are the core of advertising copy and the information that businesses want to convey to customers. Therefore, brand characteristics must not be left unnoticed or even unclear in advertisements.

In fact, Durex has a very strong brand identity. It is labeled as sex toys, adult products, and sex-related products. Due to the materials used, its products have a variety of shapes and are highly malleable. At the same time, there are also value-added labels such as creativity, leveraging momentum, and copywriting genius.

Therefore, if Durex wants to showcase its brand characteristics, it should start with diverse product shapes, creative copywriting, and leveraging trends. This Mother’s Day poster uses the color of the product’s packaging and leverages the product’s momentum, but instead of creativity, it chooses emotional expression. Is this appropriate?

The two successful posters above both use the varied product shapes to compose the image. The first one uses puns to write the creative copy, while the second one uses homophones. It also took advantage of the fact that McDonald’s was renamed Golden Arches at the time.

3. The creativity is not outstanding, and I don’t want to share it after reading it

Why do people think Durex posters are uncreative? Very cliché? What is creativity?

I believe that creativity is a work that integrates brand characteristics, theme elements, and finished product form. In particular, the entry point between brand characteristics and theme elements must be unique, and the entry method must also be unique.

There is no problem with Durex’s choice of entry point for this poster, but there is a problem with the way it is chosen : the entry point is “Listen to your mother”, which is objectively speaking, it is just so-so.

But the approach is too general: first of all, the composition. Each of the four posters is divided into two parts, but the eight parts actually only have four colors and two character models, and the composition is too similar; then there is the copywriting. The copywriting is straightforward and has no rhetorical skills. At the same time, some of the copywriting on a poster has no connection at all, and the chosen words are not representative and cannot make the audience emotionally involved.

Some friends may defend Durex, saying that the finished product is a series of posters, so of course the composition of the pictures is similar. Similar does not mean identical. One of the purposes of a series of posters is to increase memory points through unified templates. The internal logic of each poster in the series is coherent. You may want to compare the series of posters of "In the Name of People" by Durex and NetEase Kaola.

The ways to enhance memory points and stimulate secondary dissemination actually include two parts: high-quality content and pure creativity.

High-quality content is the creativity mentioned above, which combines all aspects very well and has a set of template techniques for operation. I often mention it in my articles. The other type of pure creativity is that it has little connection with the brand, but the creativity itself is attractive enough for secondary dissemination.

The following two posters show the difference:

The first one combines the brand characteristics (the double meanings of outer packaging and establishment) with the theme elements (the Christmas Eve tree and color), and the two are approached in this way: the outer packaging is used to construct the Christmas tree in the composition, and the pun of "establish" is used in the copy. The perfect combination of the two not only enhances the memory of the product, but also stimulates secondary dissemination with the help of hot spots and creativity.

The second poster is more about the creativity itself.

However, the purpose of creativity is not to be different, but to enhance the memory of positive business information and stimulate the audience's secondary dissemination. For example, the last time Durex did increase memory, negative memory, and at this time creativity stimulated secondary dissemination, which in turn magnified the effect of this negative memory.

The above analysis is my personal opinion. I hope that after reading it, you will have a more systematic understanding of the so-called badness. It is meaningless to simply criticize. Only by finding out where the mistake is can you gain valuable insights.

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Author: fat c

Source: Weird Brain Hole