Humanising brands: how Hendrick's Gin speaks to consumers

This challenge plays a big role in our agency’s thinking because as social media has changed the way people and brands communicate it is increasingly important that brands can talk to people as people. On the face of it this would appear simple, however incorporating the complexity of human interaction and the intricacy of language, mood and opinion into a brand’s social feed and content is by no means straight forward.

Brands are increasingly embracing this approach with a more content led, conversational customer centric approach. There is an ongoing drive to replicate and automate this complexity and assimilate to create smart machines, robots, programmatic internet of things and so on. As tech progresses we have reached the age of AI experimentation and now a lot of effort is being put into making machines speak and engage as humans and be recognised as human.

Even brands that understand the importance of authenticity still end up, at best, in a clichéd, over happy, ‘talking at people’ mode and, at worst, in off-brand, irrelevant one-way conversations. This is often despite there being real people, smart clever community managers, behind a lot of this content. Food and drink brands are particularly prone to this approach, for example those following the cutesy tone of voice that Innocent and Pret exemplify – hence the rise of the derogatory term ‘wackaging’

So what are we doing about it? We see the heart of the problem behind this bland tone of voice is a desire to be human while forgetting that humans come in all sorts of wonderful interesting personalities. Each human interaction and relationship is almost impossible to judge let alone replicate.

We believe that brands need to develop a clear social tone of voice, an understanding of what the brand stands for, what makes the brand tick, what is its passion and its purpose. This goes deeper than the tried and tested brand tone of voice work. It extends into all its ongoing social posts, exchanges and even the content it produces. In social, every post sits alongside content from friends and family and this means that brands need to exhibit a believable personality, one that is trusted and that can drive brand love.

This is compounded by the fact that we are in a pay to play world, where brand messages are placed in front of consumers who may know little about the brand, so having a distinct tone of voice helps gain traction and engagement.

Creating a personality blueprint doesn’t just help our clients get consistent effective work, it also makes the production of content and campaigns far easier. This helps brands be relatable and memorable.

Being immediately distinct and memorable is especially important in the food and drink sector where many purchases are spontaneous, whether an order at a bar, browsing in the supermarket or a recommendation to a friend.

Recently we came head to head with this challenge for one of our clients, Hendrick’s Gin. How does the original craft ‘most unusual gin’ still stand out on the back bar and in the supermarket when there are an increasingly large amount of new gins available?

People who drink Hendrick’s love Hendrick’s. But they are also naturally curious and often stray, excited by the new and unusual. Hendrick’s is slowly becoming part of the establishment, so it is important to keep the brand fresh and unusual to stem the success of emerging gins.

Luckily there are a number of ‘curiously minded drinkers’ who are yet to discover the delights of Hendrick’s. The challenge is how to reach them and get as many as possible to understand, try and buy Hendrick’s.

The Challenge

We needed to create a big communications platform for 2016 that could link a number of activities through a common campaign theme across press, experiential, digital, social and in bar. Most importantly it needed to talk to people in a way that not only reflected the brand values and attitude, but also that they would listen and respond to.

Reach was our main objective, so everything needed to be unusual and delightful enough to be amplified in social and PR and reach those with a curious mind who like something unusual and seek an escape from the norm. They like expanding their minds either from travel, fiction or local history, and they like having stories to tell and share so we needed to fuel their social currency.

Using social listening we found that over 1.4 million people in the UK had vented their frustrations with our transport systems on social media. Understanding that, to this audience in today’s busy world, it can be easy to forget the journey should be as delightful as the destination, we developed an idea around a key thought: ‘Put moments of peculiar delight back into everyday journeys’.

What we did

Our focus was to disrupt the mundane every day commute by launching with focused media spend behind something that gets reach ensuring it truly reflect the Hendrick’s brand personality in its execution. We created a 360 degree campaign with a difference – introducing an establishment dedicated to solving your transport problems with ingenious ideas, quips, and the odd cocktail – The Ministry of Marginally Superior Transport (MOMST).

At the heart of the campaign was the need for the brand to talk in a way that reflected the brand tone of voice, but more importantly was genuinely interesting and appealing to the target audience.

Phase 1: Launch of the MOMST campaign and reactive content

Throughout July and August, using Twitter, London and Edinburgh commuters received over 70 real-time video responses from the Ministers (Hendrick’s brand ambassadors) who aimed to marginally improve commuters’ days with humorous travel advice, bespoke audio meditations, travel games and by sending those most in need various rewards including the world’s greatest non-automated cooling devices, the Cramped Commuters Cocktail Compendium Kit, copies of the Unusual Times newspaper, bespoke Ministry issue travel wallets and unusual city guides to name a few. In addition, copies of the Unusual Times were distributed via Time Out, Stylist and other publications alongside a sizeable PR campaign.

Phase 2: The bus

At the end of July, the Ministry launched a replacement travelling gin bus around London and Edinburgh to provide gentile libations and commuter etiquette classes. Tickets to travel on The Hendrick’s Extraordinary Roving Bus of Exceptionally Refined Travel could be obtained by tweeting the Ministry @HendricksGinUK with #HendricksMinistry to receive advice and support.

Phase 3: The ongoing conversation

The final element is now to continue social led relevant communications with the audience driving to point of purchase using usage tips, occasions and passion points. What we achieved The results have been nothing short of phenomenal...

• Social: 14m social impressions, 2.7m video views, 72 videos, 4.28m social reach, 155,000 social engagements

• Print: 2m reach (4.75% coverage), 1.95 frequency with 4m impacts

• Bus experience: 2,466 with a reach of over 250,000, 8,000 vouchers dispensed and 35,000 copies of the Unusual Times

• Total digital impressions: 19,791,520

• Put the brand in front of over 4 million people in social alone and reminded them of Hendrick’s unusual positioning

• Through clever influencer targeting, added an extra 100,000 reach for the cost of no more than a tweet

• VTR was twice as good as the industry standard (skip button, what skip button?)

• Hendrick’s was mentioned five times more during the period than Bombay Sapphire

• It inspired people to proactively implore real travel companies to follow our lead

• A splendiferous 5.9% increase in retweets on the first week of the campaign in comparison to the same period last year

• Grew the Twitter following by more in one day than during the whole of 2015

• Inspired 2,500 people to try our gin on the bus and advocate the brand, unprompted, on their own social channels (the holy grail of marketing)

This article was originally published in The Drum Network Does...Food and Drink supplement on 8 December.

Andrew Roberts is owner of digital communications agency Gravity Thinking.