The Adjustable Productions Business Blog

One of the most interesting aspects of the USSR for me is how the marketing forces within it increasingly found a need to mimic the media trends of the capitalist state. This led to some very interesting products and advertising campaigns that had the vague intention of Western advertising, but with vastly reduced budgets, and varying degrees of self-consciousness over associating too ‘decadent’ an image with their products.

This creates a curious type of advertising. In the 80’s a lot of Western brands made it their explicit aim to associate glamour, decadence and style with their product. So why would Communist states try and reproduce this type of advertising, especially in a climate when independent business enterprise was extremely limited? I think it is symptomatic of the approach of the USSR’s Communism. They wait to see what Western Capitalism does, copies it badly, and then claims it is an example of Communist progress and development. At no point to the people making the knock off actually understand what original concept is or how it waorks. They just try and make something that looks similar. And because they don’t understand it they miss so much, and the average viewer can see straight through the laughable, but strangely interesting attempts at Western style advertising campaigns.

There was a need for the products, and it was largely driven by exposure to products from the West. The people wanted branded products, and Western style advertising was needed to develop the brands. Marketeers in the USSR became a necessary part in a developing retail system. While trying to create a branded products to distract the public from the appeal of the Western branded economy, the USSR perhaps unwitting embraced some of the core elements of Western Capitalist economy, and moved their Union further towards its own collapse.

There are a bunch of really interesting Hungarian adverts from the Communist era on Youtube at the moment, including this one:

This is a classic. It appears to be a product which aims to prevent motor vehicles from corrosion. I do not speak Hungarian,  so maybe I am harsh in my critique, but this seems to have all the core elements of an advert based on a misunderstanding of a western advert. It features a yellow puppet, which I think is supposed to be vaguely based on a Muppet design. However, the production team have missed a critical technical requirement. The Muppets had a pioneering design where the entire puppet is held above the head. The puppeteer used one arm to control the body and head, operating the mouth, and the other to control the arm like a glove (or with lighter weigh models, with a stick). If a second arm was required then a second puppeteer would step in to operate it in perfect harmony with the rest of the Muppet. In this production the puppeteer is clearly crouched behind a low desk. You can tell this because the puppeteer’s head is clearly visible throughout the opening shot. In this position it is not possible to emulate the classic Muppet stance, and the arm of the puppet does not seem to connect to its body. They do not even have the basic tools of the Muppet style puppeteer, a tv screen to show them what they are doing. You can actually see the puppeteer straining to see what is happening on the desk.

In their wisdom they have blessed this creation with a manic ring-modulated voice, full of menace and terror, the stuff of pure nightmares. I suspect this may have been at least partially inspired by the Honey Monster from the Sugar Puffs adverts. Coupled with a series of shots of the creature appearing unannounced in a variety of car based situations, culminating in him emerging like some beast from the depths screaming “mruh ha ha ha!”, you have an advert which would have had limited impact on Western consumers, but would most likely have scared small children, forever leaving them fearful of sun based talking hand puppets.

The Felix and Milky Way brands have recently taken advantage of fondly remembered adverts from past campaigns by recycling them for new campaigns. This has raised some interesting issues that I shall investigate in more depth in a future post.

Walker’s have gone a step further in embracing the retro-branding ethos by producing rough equivalents of the 70’s and 80’s version of ‘Monster Munch’, another brand that they picked up from Smiths in the 1990’s. The product was subsequently modified in terms of flavours and considerable downsizing with mixed public response. In its retro-rebranding and recreation, the ‘Mega Monster Munch’ brand is portrayed as an equivalent of the original version of the product. It has vaguely similar packaging designs and a recipe that mimics the originals, but it integrates concessions for the health concerns and packaging methods of today.

Mega Monster Munch packaging, as used in February 2010, mimicking the 70's and 80's designs.

The advertising campaign that accompanied the launch of ‘Mega Monster Munch’ was intrinsically linked to original advertising series which started in the 1970’s, and went further by specifically utilizing figures from 70’s 80’s television that would evoke more nostalgic memories in children of the time. Notably it was mainly PR based, with little advertising on the TV media. They made use of the presence of the old campaign in the public consciousness, to lever coverage for their new ‘Search for the Monster Munch costume’ campaign in a lot of current affairs programming and news headlines.

The premise is that Walker’s wanted to make new adverts in the style of the original series featuring the now famous monsters. For those of you who are unfamiliar, here is the original advert:

Walker’s claim that the original monster costumes have been lost, and before they can make their new campaign they need to find them. Thus there follows a series of viral videos, such as the one presented below, which featuring our friend from Rainbow, Geoffrey Hayes, who now earns a living as a taxi driver:

The campaign avoids some of the obvious questions such as:

1: Why don’t they just make new costumes?
2: Isn’t ‘junk food’ advertising severely restricted in the UK now? Would they be able to run campaigns like they did from the 1970’s through to the 1990’s? It does raise the question of whether they ever actually intended to run an advertising campaign after all.

Again, who exactly they are marketing it at is not clear. It seems that they want to try and snag some of the people who are now grown up that were eating the product when they were kids 20 years ago. Maybe they are trying to guide them towards buying the product for their children? Current legislation actually makes this a very appealing strategy, as it is now very difficult for advertisers to aim advertising for anything considered ‘junk food’ directly at children (this has lead to a corresponding decline in children’s television production, but I shall discuss this further at a later date). This is one of the reasons that certain brands that formerly had advertising campaigns squarely aimed at children, are now being advertised in a radically altered form during post 9pm watershed hours. ‘Coco Pops’ are a prime example of this. I shall examine what Kellogs has been up to with this brand in a future post.

However, the overall success of the retrobranding appears to have been considerable. The campaign was launched with the impression that the ‘Mega Monster Munch’ brand was a one off special edition. Since then ‘Mega Monster Munch’ has replaced the conventional ‘Monster Munch’ brand entirely, and the ‘Mega’ appendage appears to be slowly shrinking on the package and the branding in general.

Moving on from the rather crass re-branding of Mr Muscle (which I focused on in an earlier post), something caught my eye while in Wilkinson’s yesterday. I spotted two brands sitting side by side that have not been obviously altered since the 1980’s, if ever. The brands in question are Frazzles and Chipsticks.

Chipsticks and Frazzles, 2009 - or is it 1989?

There are some interesting things about this consistent approach to branding and design. For one, the products look very 1980’s. They retain a lot of the design style, layout and typefaces common in that era. If you jumped into a time machine and snuck it onto Sainsbury’s shelves in the 1983, the current product would probably hard to spot amongst the product of that era. However, perhaps surprisingly, they also keep the classic ‘Smiths’ logo, even though the brand is now owned by their former leading competitor, Walkers.

A Chipsticks close up. Miss no detail...

I am not quite sure what the marketing thinking is behind this approach (some may argue it a non-approach) to product design, but I think I like it. Many producers seem to have an unhealthy pre-occupation with always claiming that there is something new about their product, constantly changing and tweaking the contents and the packaging. In the current retail climate, where a lot of groceries and food shopping is done in vast hypermarkets that carry hundreds of thousands of lines, I think there is a real benefit to having an easily recognised products design. And while there are people that do have the attitude of wanting the ‘new’ thing, a lot of people actually just want the reassuring familiarity of the brand that they know and are comfortable with. Jazzy rebrands and product redesigns can alienate a lot of that core market. I am still yet to be convinced that radical redesigns actually do more good than damage.

What a lot of marketing people seem to miss is how effective the campaigns of yesteryear were, and that people really do attach a lot of nostalgia to the logos, the typefaces, the colours, the packaging, the catchphrases, the adverts and so on. For instance, on the way back from that that trip to Wilkinsons, we walked past a newsagent that had a flag with the most recent Walls ice cream logo, and another with a logo from the late 80’s/early 90’s. The new logo meant nothing to me, but the old logo reminded me of holidays at Sandbanks, walking on the beach, watching the tide go out for miles, and all the little things that I associated with the good times had when consuming the product. Now, the newer logo might inspire this for people who were going on those holidays 10 years later, but I am not sure. For me the newer logo just looks like a swish corporate effort, used to impress shareholders and investors when it is on the front of some portfolio, and it just makes me think how much more rubbish and miserable and full of care life has become. If there was a little more consistency in the logo, everyone that sees it could be more inclined to hold the values and feelings it implants during childhood.

It does not seem that the value of old campaigns and designs are entirely lost on the established branding giants. Some have recognised that reverting to old designs can bring about reminiscence and nostalgia for times perceived as ‘happier’ and ’simpler’ (such as in a recent soap powder campaign), and they want these themes associated with their product. Some have observed that the current economic climate seems to be driving a nostalgic interest in consumers for both old versions of their branding and older versions of the actual products themselves. What is more, it must be an appealing approach for brands that are trading with reduced marketing budgets. Recycling old campaigns is surely cheaper than commissioning a brand new one?

I shall look at the various approaches marketeers are taking towards re-purposing old campaigns in some forthcoming posts.

Every now and then, I see things like this:

Hello Kitty Mallow Briefcase

It is one of the incredibly long line of officially sanctioned ‘Hello Kitty’ products. What is ‘Hello Kitty’?: I don’t quite know. All I know is that it came from Japan, there is a lot of it, and Japanese people get the Hello Kitty logo and derivatives heavily marketed to them in their native country. The mystery is, why is the line getting so popular in Europe and the Rest of the World? As far as I am aware, there is little of no direct advertising of the brand in these territories. It is just like the mystique of the brand is somehow magically carrying over across the waves.

It seems that the only marketing exposure the brand gets outside of Japan is the incidental PR the various licenses merchandise picks up in the popular press. If it was not for that, I am guessing that nobody outside of Japan would have heard of Hello Kitty. Or is it that the character embodies so much of the fundamental elements of ‘cuteness’, that it will offer a magnetic attraction to all those susceptible to such things, and thus self generate its own buzz and interest with no need for a coordinated marketing campaign? Is it like a cross between a cleavage and go faster stripes, but for women?

Back in the 80’s when adverts were generally brilliant, and agencies in the UK had mastery of a concept known as irony, there used to be quite a popular series of 20 second spots for the ‘Mr Muscle’ brand of bathroom and kitchen cleaners. The tag revolved around the user of these goods being a rather weedy looking spectacled man, usually dressed in a string vest and shorts:

These adverts were quite a phenomenon, and achieved with distinction what all advertising agencies should surely aspire to: They entered the national psyche.

School children would use ‘Mr Muscle’ to describe the wimpy kids in the class. Workmen who were struggling to saw a piece of wood would get cat calls of “you need to get in the Mr Muscle for that job”. Anyone with a pair of glasses, or pair of shorts or vest that had less than a herculean figure would be known as a ‘Mr Muscle’. The campaign work fantastically well as it got across the message that the product was something that anybody could use to get good results.

And now, 20 years later, in the homogenised era where we seem to share our poorly redubbed adverts with Spain, Germany and most of the rest of Europe, we have this regressive offering:

The funny thing is that Gerald Home (the actor playing Mr Muscle in the previous advert) is much more of a man than the new, beefed up, multi-lingual computer sprite Mr Muscle will ever be. In reality, that Mr Muscle is actually no more than a tennis ball on a stick waived around in front of the actress.

One of the reasons this does not work is because the previous series of adverts were so successful that a sufficient part of the target audience still remember them. Their first reaction to this advert is therefore likely to be “what is this rubbish?”. They would probably do a lot better rerunning or repurposing the old adverts (something which a few brands such as Ariel and Felix have been doing recently).

Interestingly, this version, which appears to be in Russian, seems to allude to the old ways of the Communist era athletes ‘training’ programs…