Women helping the pour
Silk has a problem that most brands would kill for: a 70 percent share of soy-milk drinkers. Makes you wonder why it would bother with a major new marketing push. To grab the other 30 percent? Sure.
But with more Americans switching to healthier eating, Silk no doubt has its eyes on a bigger prize: Those who aren’t yet soy drinkers. That seems to be what’s behind its new “Take a sip forward” campaign: Explain to regular-milk drinkers that soy is not, well, icky. How to do that?
Well, just get the lady next door – or five of them – to say as much. But average-Joe (or Jane, in this case) ads are an old idea. Can testimonials by actors still work on a jaded populous? We tapped Ogilvy and DDB veteran Kathy Sharpe, founder of Sharpe Partners, New York, to play the skeptic.
I might as well confess, the new Silk Soymilk campaign from Berlin Cameron, New York, vaguely annoyed me – at least, it did at first. It annoyed me until I realized that I was looking at it (one cannot help these things) as a marketer. Then something interesting happened: When I willed myself into a consumer’s perspective, the whole effort hit me as amazingly audacious.
My initial rankling had been the result of knowing the process (again, one cannot help these things). Let any marketer but glance at the TV spot and the strategy brief slips out from behind the vignettes–in this case, the “everyday” women, their testimonials and the unifying tagline: “Take a Sip Forward.” Oh, I could just see the focus groups that preceded this one.
Ditto the objective that did: Achieve trial with Old School. People think soy milk tastes bad, folks, we gotta overcome the viscerally unappealing idea of drinking liquid tofu. And from there, the strategy materializes: Run screaming from any association with soy and position the brand Silk as a great-tasting beverage, healthy and beyond wonderful with any food you normally combine with milk (especially cereal).
So here’s what that looks like: A series of five TV spots (each with a corresponding still for print), featuring the sort of “real woman” that Dove soap made famous umpteen years ago. I can picture the casting call, too. Women: Attractive, not too attractive, energetic. Wardrobe: sporty, casual, not quite yoga.
In each spot, the likes of thirty-somethings Martine, Elizabeth and Jivelle deliver an effervescent yet affectingly genuine talk about – this can’t be easy – how soy milk entered their lives: They tried, they liked and now even their male beaus love Silk, too. (No strategic planner would allow the exclusion of the small, but influential, male target.)
As they speak, animated curlicues sprout from behind them; a bit distracting, but still a relief from the otherwise stark, white backdrop. Finally, cut to final shot of Silk with a bowl of cereal.
That’s what the marketing eye sees, anyway, and it’s an appraisal rendered nearsighted by 25 years’ worth of creative briefs and nights behind the glass mirror. So let’s pass back through the looking glass, in the interests of fairness, to look at the real power of this campaign, which is its ability to use something so simple to do so much.
Sophisticated as they are, the average really real woman (whose lives are blissfully free of focus groups) are probably quite open to a direct appeal to their basic needs: health, happiness and a great bowl of cereal. That is the singular takeaway communication of the Silk campaign. Insofar as consumers like and believe “real” testimonials like these, the potential for success is huge.
Here’s the point: Silk’s willingness to stake everything on that interaction (after all, there’s nothing else in these ads) is actually quite brave. The energy of these spokeswomen – complete with all the natural y’knows and haltings of conversational speech – makes the scripts sing with a recognizable realness.
“It was good, it was cold,” says Julie, smiling while swirling her hand around in the air to conjure the image of mixing milk in cereal. “It gave, kinda like the bland, healthy cereal, a little bit of like, a, y’know, a little personality.”
These women aren’t asked to do too much. They’re allowed to stay in their space without needing to take on reading the starchy, health-benefit copy. The male voice takes over to read that, and the church/state separation is smart. It works. It protects the real-women status and ups the believability quotient immeasurably.
Unfortunately, this same dynamic is what makes the print executions less successful. Showing, as they do, stills of each woman alongside a pull quote (example: “What do I like about Silk Chocolate? It tastes like chocolate”) lacks the personality that a TV performance delivers. It’s an oversight that’s probably the result of either a brand manager afraid of making fun of the product or a copywriter afraid of funny women.
For me, there was a larger dynamic at work here in the form of a question: Will Silk transcend its simple soybean roots to be what Kleenex is for facial tissues and Rollerblades are for inline skates? Can the brand, in other words, become the one word that’s used to define its category?
This cluster of spots is too simple and brief an execution, perhaps, to get that far. But they do so good a job in distancing the brand from the manifold negative associations people have with milk substitutes to constitute, it seems clear, a definitive first step.
