Weight Watchers gets cheeky with its assets!
As we kick off the 2022 working year we thought this guerilla marketing style ad was a cheeky bit of fun. Truth be told, we can’t actually track down a credible source for these ads and who knows if they are real or fake. Does it matter? Not really. Whether a piece of content is endorsed and produced by a brand owner or not bears little relevance to its life cycle in the social ether and this caught my eye. Who knows, in 12 months time we might see these images as highly sought after NFT’s with a global brand bidding war over ownership!
Distinctive assets are just that, distinctive - familiar and recognisable. Brands that have endured years, decades and even centuries can be so familiar that they have been embedded into our memory structures with so much potency that we don’t even require conscious processing. We see them, our brain processes their colour and form and we inherently understand the signal. Our association with that brand, good, bad or indifferent won’t prevent us from recognising and interpreting the information - our unconscious brain doesn’t filter that way.
So, in the instance of this Weight Watchers series it has cleverly leveraged the distinctive assets of global household names like McDonalds and M&M’s via form and colour. It aligns to their core proposition message of ”Eat what you want” in sentiment only and triggers the taste associations of products we know are ’sometimes foods”. The outcomes is “I can take care of myself and still enjoy my favourite treats”. It’s a 'best of both worlds’ message designed to imbed the Weight Watchers brand into everyday life with permissibility. Clever.
Why it works:
- it uses colour and form to get the viewers attention (reinforces familiarity)
- it’s cheeky and unexpected (creates a moment of surprise)
- it forces the viewer to pause and decode the play on words and visual patterns (creates an “ahh haa” moment)
If you have assets in your brand toolkit that can be used to build familiarity, create moments of surprise and get a little laugh then I suggest you use this year to see what you can make of it. Get silly, deconstruct them, see how far you can push the ‘envelope’ so-to speak. After the last 2 years or turmoil it is pretty much anything goes in 2022!
Written by Amber Bonney
Founder, CEO and Head of Strategy @ The Edison Agency
IMAGE CONTENT: Source unknown
