Cravendale and the Thumb Cats

This is a fantastic example of making great creative and great strategy in tandem. Wieden + Kennedy London have worked for a while now with Cravendale Milk. Cravendale’s special feature is that it’s filtered, which gives it a better taste. Exciting stuff.

And yet oddly enough Cravendale has been a part of the national conversation for years now, with great, fun, engaging advertising. Still more so with the creation of a semi-recent campaign, Cats With Thumbs. You can guess what the premise was.

Cats have launched a series of horrific attacks on humans, cutting off thumbs as trophies in what will later be known as the Thumb War. Their leader, Lionel von Mewserschatz, has just declared: “Your people, your land, your balls of twine are now ours, here and henceforth.” In reaction, the –

OK so apparently that wasn’t the premise.

(Though I think we can agree that that would make a great movie.)

The real idea of course was that if cats had thumbs they would steal Cravendale milk. Which is a simple idea to be sure, but it was executed fantastically. Check it out.

What I want to concentrate on though is the strategic thinking that went into it. Because what they did was not just come up with a fun idea with the Cats With Thumbs concept, they seeded the idea in the public imagination before the campaign was even launched, to help it fit more readily into our minds and seem part of a trend, rather than just being a strange, eye-catching initiative.

They did it through unbranded content, with guerrilla marketing that was so guerrilla that the whole team was probably wearing camouflage throughout. By releasing a video weeks in advance showing a housecat which appeared to have thumbs, the Cats With Thumbs concept was spread around the web virally with no one imagining that there might be any deeper meaning behind it.

And so, when the actual campaign launched, it was essentially as though we had already seen the film before – we were aware and accepting and bought-in to the idea without even realising it.

Now that is some serious planning.

Seeding an idea amongst your audience might seem a little Machiavellian, a little disturbing in a way, but that’s not what this is about. It’s not forcing an idea on people. All it’s doing is creating familiarity with an idea, making the audience comfortable with a strange concept.

Comedians do it all the time – Jimmy Carr discusses this in a talk, how he builds a rapport with the audience at his shows, getting them used to his style of no-holds-barred comedy before ramping it up to its more shocking level.

Or take pop music. You might have noticed this phenomenon, when you hear a song and think it’s an old classic, only to discover that it actually just came out last month – but because you’ve been hearing it casually all this time it seems familiar. As if you had always known it.

That’s what WK did with Cravendale. They sowed seeds, and built an invisible rapport. That’s not just knowing your audience. That’s knowing audiences in general.

When you can make people understand your message before you’ve even said it, you’ve already won half the battle.

Enthusiam Sells, Or, Iguanas With Hats In Argentina

If you can’t be enthusiastic about what you’re selling, you can’t expect anyone else to be. But there’s an upside to that argument, which is that if you can be enthusiastic, if you can genuinely, strongly want your client to succeed, that enthusiasm is a powerful tool.

People sometimes talk mockingly about an ad’s passion for product X or service Y, as though there is something wholly artificial about advocating for a client’s work. Sure, it is true in some cases. There are plenty of agencies who just phone it in.

But genuine passion for the task at hand – communication – is not the same thing.

I used to work in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, on a street team selling tickets to shows. I was pretty good at it. The reason was that whatever act I was selling on a particular day, there was always something positive to say about it. I knew the acts, I knew their shows – and that’s what came across.

I would be full of energy, excited to tell people about this show because I saw it last week and it was amazing and the guy is really cool and has this story about the iguana with a hat in Argentina and the mermaids and – you get the idea.

Being a genuine advocate for these people made my sales pitch so much more effective. People can sense enthusiasm, and trust it when it seems genuine.

Which is why you have to find a genuine reason to be excited about your side.

Here’s a great example of runaway enthusiasm changing everything for a brand. Lurpak butter got the Wieden + Kennedy treatment a while ago, going from a backwards dairy spread to the face of great food in no time at all. Before, Lurpak was seen as old-fashioned, dull, unhealthy – the product of an older generation. Butter wasn’t cool. Lurpak wasn’t cool. And why should it be? It’s just butter.

But that’s not what W+K saw. They knew that any brand is what you make of it. And any brand can have a deep emotional connection – if you make it work.

Lurpak is just butter. But why shouldn’t it be cool?

W+K could have done a series of ads that said “Butter isn’t so bad, butter can be quite nice, Lurpak is a nice kind of butter”. But there’s no passion there, no emotional pull.

(Apart from anything else, I’ve been told that the word ‘nice’ is basically the advertising equivalent to veal.)

The solution was to be provocative – not to offend, but to take a stance. It may only be butter, but it is reclaiming its place in the kitchen, and doing so with no apologies for itself.

“Good food deserves Lurpak.”

And there’s the key. The ads themselves are beautiful, engaging pieces of communication. But what makes them work is the brand identity behind them. Because it’s not about what Lurpak is – it’s about what Lurpak means. That is an emotional question, not one based on statistics. And thanks to Wieden + Kennedy, Lurpak now means great food, and pride in great cooking. And everyone knows it.

That’s the lesson here. There are no limits on which products can have an emotional pull. So find the emotion, find the passion behind your brand, and let everyone know it.