Honest Signalling: the emotional power of 'doing what it says on the tin'

The 3rd most famous advertising slogan of all time nearly didn’t make it. Ronseal knew they wanted something ‘straight, literal and that got to the point’. But Liz Whiston and Dave Shelton, from ad agency HHCL and Partners, had to fight for their creation all the way. Planners assumed that their ‘anti-slogan’ was a ‘placeholder’ and that a ‘proper’ line would be written later. Research told them that the line was dull and ‘wasn’t advertising enough’.

Of course, the rest is history. As Ronseal note on their own website, ‘Does exactly what it says on the tin’ is now firmly established in popular culture and has ‘become part of our everyday vernacular’??It’s become so ingrained in public consciousness that many would now find it hard to believe that it was made up in an ad agency in 1994.

How did Ronseal do it? While everyone else was holding out for something that was more in keeping with received wisdom, or prevailing fashion in the advertising industry, Greg Shields, Ronseal’s Marketing Director had his own opinions and the courage of his convictions. Here’s Steve Henry talking in Creative Review about how ‘Does exactly what it says on the tin’ tapped into mainstream culture:

“The campaign went against the grain of all the clever advertising around at the time. So, it stood out massively and had an emotional connection with people, precisely because it wasn’t a typical piece of advertising confection.” Steve Henry (in Creative Review)

Of course, campaigns like Ronseal still go against the grain in adland. And, as house51 and Reach showed in 'The Aspiration Window' time and again, the latest advertising confections (e.g. social purpose) crowd out proven, but unfashionable, principles about how people out there in the real world make buying decisions.

Even at the height of the Covid crisis, while brands fell over themselves to be 'there for you' it was good old fashioned value for money, reliability and product quality that were the top buying priorities for the mainstream. Indeed, contrary to the new social purpose orthodoxy in the ad industry, we found that these were also the attributes that markters also prioritised in their personal buying decisions!

And now, as Covid lingers and the UK public face an economic crisis and a 'summer of discontent', ad land has flocked back to Cannes. Brand performance, quality and value are not high on the agenda.?Instead, adland doubles down on purpose as inflation reaches a 40-year high....

So, following the purpose fest in Cannes, here are a few things that I think we can learn from taking another look at Ronseal

The Importance of 'Standing for Something'

Of course, Ronseal shows that ‘standing for something’ really does matter.?And Ronseal achieved the cultural impact that social purpose marketers crave. As they note on their website, people use the phrase ‘Does Exactly What It Says on the Tin’ every day: ‘it has come to represent a product or policy that is open and honest’. Every marketer can identify with that goal. But Ronseal did it by standing for something that was unfashionable in the advertising industry but mattered deeply to their customers- the quality and reliability of their product….

A better understanding of 'emotion'

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Many marketers have reduced the canon of behaviour science to one principle: the primacy of emotion. So, ‘functional’ and ‘rational’ become pejorative terms used to dismiss performance attributes like reliability, quality, etc. When, in fact, these are the basic building blocks of decision making.

But marketers are also working with a very narrow and reductive understanding of emotions. If marketers stop to think, it should be clear that in the real world, brand quality and reliability are experienced emotionally. If a product lets you down, you feel it.

The guys at HHCL and Ronseal understood this. ?'Does what is says on the tin’ worked because as Dave Shelton explains ‘people were afraid of using the wrong thing’.?And Ronseal had such a lasting cultural impact because it tapped into fundamental human needs for reducing uncertainty and risk.?And when you remove risk and uncertainty, people feel good.

Honest Signalling

The theory of costly or honest signalling is also a useful guide here. This shows that humans, just like other animals, are highly attuned to quality and reliability signals. There is a wide range of academic and market research (including house51’s recent work on Signalling Success with Thinkbox) that shows how people differentiate brands using fitness signals (i.e., performance, quality, reliability) based on an intuitive (i.e., unconscious, implicit) evaluation of factors like product attributes, messaging, creative execution and media choice.?

As Paul Feldwick emphasises in ‘The Anatomy of Humbug’ ‘everything communicates’ and it’s also impossible not to communicate. So, marketers may dismiss the importance of quality, reliability etc, but people are going to take these signals out of their work anyway.

Never let a good crisis go to waste

While Covid may be over in adland, many people in the real world are still struggling. And, as economic crisis deepens, there is going to be a lot of risk and uncertainty out there. The marketing industry have proven that they are not shy about exploiting a crisis. And the instinctive reaction is to go into overdrive on purpose. There seems to be no end to the unedifying spectacle of the world’s biggest brands clamouring to wring every last drop of cheap sentiment out of a global environmental and health crisis and the misery of inequality and discrimination.???

But marketers are also supposed to be fans of psychology and behavioural science. This shows that in moments of heightened uncertainty and peril animals and humans use fitness signals to mitigate risk and inform their decisions. So, instead of talking about saving the world or changing society this is the ideal time to be talking about your brands quality and reliability.

If the economic crisis helps marketers rediscover these fundamentals, it could be the best thing to happen to our industry in years.