25 THE PLASTIC PEOPLE WITH
THE PLASTIC SMILES

Oxo is the leading stock cube brand in the UK and has been so for nearly 100 years. However, despite a history of great advertising, in the early 1980s it had lost its edge. Unfortunately for the brand this was just at the time when it was facing an increasing difficult marketplace.

There was a general decline in meat eating, a rapid increase in the consumption of ethnic foods (not something with which Oxo was generally associated), growth in the cooking-sauce market and on-going competition from other stock cube and gravy granule brands.

J. Walter Thompson, Oxo’s advertising agency, and its senior planner, Ev Jenkins, suggested a radical piece of research. The research wouldn’t focus on a new campaign idea, or even the brand itself, but would investigate family life in the UK. It would explore what family life was really like in the 1980s and what people’s reactions were to how families were being presented in the media. While such ethnographic research is now commonplace, it was the first time that a major brand had commissioned a study that went beyond the scope of its business.

Ev Jenkins’ rationale was that Oxo should be positioned as being central to good home cooking, and that good home cooking was central to good home life. This atypical research was conducted by Stephen Wells and he recalls:

“When I asked these mothers about family life, they let loose with a deluge of the trials and tribulations of everyday family life – doing the washing, trying to dry it when it had rained every day, doing the shopping and still trying to make ends meet, working out what to cook and then trying to get the kids to eat...

“Then, just as I was wondering why anyone had a family if this is what it was really like, one of the mothers would remember something heart-warming – their child’s first steps, a drawing brought home from school, and suddenly everyone would be smiling.”

This uneven balance of grief offset with small but very precious moments of relief was the reality of family life. Stephen christened it “war and peace” but noted “that there seemed to a lot more war than peace”.

The second key finding was that in the early 1980s, UK broadcast media were moving ahead of advertising. Programmes such as Butterflies, which humorously depicted a mother’s attempts to cope with two teenage sons, and the soap Brookside were starting to reflect the reality of everyday life much more honestly than advertising.

Advertising of the time was full of perfect families, made up of attractive mums, handsome dads, and children who were always immaculately behaved. Someone in the research christened them “plastic people with plastic smiles”.

What the research clearly identified was that there was an opportunity for a brand to reflect more accurately what family life was like. Based on these two key insights, JWT developed what was to become one of the most famous and effective food advertising campaigns of all time. Launched in 1983, it ran until 1999.

And the moral is that advertising doesn’t need to be glossy to be successful; empathy is a powerful tool. How well do you really know the motivations and realities of your customers?