John Fanning endorses Barry’s Tea ads for suggesting that a move to rural Ireland may go some way to unleashing people’s creative potential
Recent articles by columnist David McWilliams in The Irish Times have forecast another nail in the coffin of long-term marketing communications for brand building. In March of last year, he wrote about the supposed inability of younger people, or Gen Z – or even Gen Alpha, if you prefer – to sustain attention on anything for more than a few seconds and where all information “is repackaged into bite-sized immediate hits of dopamine”.
In his last column of the year, McWilliams argued that the traditional “gatekeepers” of the media; professional editors and producers, are now regarded as defunct in our brave new world where every pub bore can potentially address a global audience by blogging, podcasting or sub-stacking without having to bother about such tiresome old-fashioned ideas like grammar, accuracy or commonsense.
I have no option but to accept that we are where we are, but it does not augur well for consumer brands. Both developments present problems for brand managers. Successful brands need a public audience with the capacity to stay tuned long enough to listen to a story and powerful mass media to carry the story.
Replenishment
You don’t have to believe everything Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass School say to accept the proposition that all brand audiences are leaky buckets continually losing customers through death, location movement and a myriad of other factors where constant replenishment is required. The best way to guarantee this is through some form of mass market communications. A current campaign run by the UK’s advertising industry boldly states that “Forty years of evidence proves that long-term brand growth is driven by sustained and consistent investment in long-term brand building advertising campaigns”.
Such campaigns have been in short supply recently, but hope springs eternal. One of our best loved Irish brands recently showed that powerful advertising with a creative heart is still possible. Barry’s Tea has always been a champion of long-term brand building and good storytelling with a succession of popular ads often chronicling the increasing self-confidence of young Irish women playing off what has arguably been the most significant cultural trend in Ireland during the last 40 years. They have been amply rewarded. In 1980, Barry’s share of the Irish tea market was 18 per cent. Today, it’s over 40 per cent, and all the time they were advancing on and then overtaking the former long-term brand leader.
In the heart of Ireland, world champions can emerge and still make it their home base
Barry’s recently rolled out a new series of TV commercials, which were created by TBWA\Dublin, that maintain the self-confident Irish women theme while adding a new dimension; that in the heart of Ireland, world champions can emerge and still make it their home base, and that maybe a move to rural Ireland could unleash our own creative potential. This does not represent a retreat from a cosmopolitan multinational utopia, far from it, it’s an assertion of an equally vibrant alternative in the locations featured in this campaign; Clifden, Skibbereen and the Blasket Islands.
On reflection, however, there may be another subtle but powerful cultural message here. In the words of poet Derek Mahon, we are living in an “age of unbeauty, rage and fear”; insecurity is once again an active ingredient in political life. The new political ‘strongmen’ aided and abetted by the tech bros are in the process of creating a new world disorder taking their cue from arch-libertarian Ayn Rand’s famous dictum; “it’s not who’s going to let me, it’s who’s going to stop me”.
Rules
They believe the new world of cyberspace has the right to create its own rules free from any old-fashioned democratic impulses, the tiresome constraints of professional or ethical standards and, of course, any obligation to pay taxes. In a recent revealing op-ed piece in the Financial Times one of their leading ideologues accused anyone who disagreed with them as suffering from a DISC condition; Distributed Idea Suppression Complex. Given that this condition is particularly prevalent among older age groups, we are dismissed as a shower of old Struldburggs (look it up!). Their vision of a new techno-feudal world means we’re all Duned; so wouldn’t we be better off drinking Barry’s Tea on the Wild Atlantic Way.
John Fanning lectures on branding and marketing communications at the UCD Smurfit Graduate Business School; john.fanning44@gmail.com
