Heads Up: Say it. Say it again. And maybe even say it again…
Specsavers, a UK-based opticians (eyesight testing and selling glasses) has said the same 4 words across their marketing for the last 22 years. Starting off as a pithy one-liner in 2002, this tagline was tried and tested and has transcended advertising to become a part of everyday language in the UK.
Should’ve gone to Specsavers.
The Brief: In this case, the brief wasn’t to create a tagline that would last 22 years, but merely add some humour into an ad for their brand where a child says this tagline to their father. It was the marketing team at that time who thought that this tagline could have some traction over the longer term and decided to test this as a viable tagline.
The Campaign: Specsavers have taken this clever one-liner and ran with creative idea after creative idea for over two decades, producing marketing billboards and stunts which have captured the attention of the public.
The premise for their concept comes from simply suggesting that people should have their eyes tested as for whatever reason, their eyesight seems to be impaired, causing them to make mistakes as you can see in all examples below.
Why does it stand out?
➡ ️ The concept is funny
➡ ️The scenarios are often shocking
➡ ️It’s a short and simple message that can be used in wide range of contexts
➡ ️There are endless stunts you could pull off within this concept
➡ ️One of the 4 words is their brand so when using this phrase people are saying your brand name
This phrase is so ingrained in our language that the public sometimes do their marketing for them such as this re-posting from a news story where someone drove into one of their stores.
It can be tempting to keep changing our messaging to try to tap into new audiences, or especially when we have new stories to tell or messaging to share. And of course, Specsavers have other marketing outputs alongside this campaign such as advertising new services or offerings, but they keep this campaign active with periodic brand-building stunts and ads that keep this message alive.
There is research to back this up which proves that the fewer the messages, the greater the recall and therefore memorability of your brand.
Heads Up Challenge: Simply say it
(Copy the below into a working document that you can use for the challenge each week)
Write down three options for a simple organisation or campaign tagline that you could repeat, repeat and repeat again
Idea 1:
Idea 2:
Idea 3:
Set aside a weekly 15 minute slot to complete these weekly creative tasks and why not schedule a call with others on your team to talk through your thoughts on this topic and share ideas for you to try out?
Heads Up is a weekly creative digest that encourages animal advocates to take inspiration from case studies of creative campaign tactics outside of our movement.
> ~ 5 minutes read-time (but hopefully gets you thinking for longer than that)
> Demonstrates interesting tactics and use of biases that you can test
> Contains a creative challenge for you to explore independently or with your team with results that you can apply for your important campaigning work
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