Blackmores What Women Want Case Study

Case Study
What Women Want
Fairfax Media - Blackmores
CAMPAIGN PERIOD: SEPTEMBER 2012 - APRIL 2013
OBJECTIVES
TARGET AUDIENCE
STRATEGY
Build a stronger connection
Health aware individuals
The notion of ‘more’
Promote Blackmores’ superior brand
quality and heritage, so customers aren’t
swayed by cheaper brands.
Women who are determined, seek more
from their mind and body, and are aware of
the positive benefits vitamins and minerals
have on their health.
To help position Blackmores as a more
visionary company, the ‘What Women
Want’ campaign was created with the
notion that women want more. MORE
involvement in relevant environments,
MORE engaged conversations, MORE
consistency of messaging.
Drive brand awareness and consideration
of Caltrate Vitamin D.
Case Study
What Women Want
Campaign
With Sunday Life’s positioning of BODY.
MIND. INSPIRATION, together with Daily
Life’s strong online presence, both brands
provided the perfect vehicles to promote
Blackmores’ visionary positioning. The
campaign consisted of three elements: a
survey, bespoke content and a reader event.
01
‘What Women Want’
Survey
A special survey was run on Daily Life
aiming to discover everything there is to
know about women.
What makes the modern Australian woman
tick? What motivates her? Makes her
happy? Sad? How do Australian women
feel about the future?
balance
WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?
The survey ran for 4 weeks across desktop
and m-site platforms, and attracted 1524
respondents.
1HERSA1 A012
12
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2012
The Sydney Morning Herald
smh.com.au
WELLBEING
The hormone that
makes us good or evil
In pursuit of
unhappiness
Satisfaction and growth are preferable to
a fleeting happiness, writes Frank Bures.
W
Paul Zak calls oxytocin the ‘‘moral molecule’’. He tells Oliver Burkeman how hugging,
massage and watching soppy movies could make us better people.
Fairfax Media - Blackmores
T
he American academic Paul
Zak is renowned among his
colleagues for two things he
does to people disconcertingly soon after meeting
them. The first is hugging:
seeing me approach across the library of
his club, in midtown Manhattan, he
springs to his feet, ignoring my
outstretched hand, and enfolds me in his
arms. The second is sticking needles in
their arms to draw blood.
I escape our encounter unpunctured,
but plenty of people don’t: Zak’s work,
which he refers to as ‘‘vampire studies’’,
has involved extracting blood from a
bride and groom on their wedding day;
from people who have just had massages,
or been dancing; from Quakers, before
and after their silent worship; and from
tribal warriors in Papua New Guinea as
they prepare for traditional rituals.
That all these people
submit so willingly to his
needle may have something to do with the fact
that he is charm
personified. A squarejawed, 50-year-old
Californian with good
hair, a sunny disposition and a mediafriendly nickname (‘‘Dr
Love’’), Zak gives every
impression of having been
constructed in a laboratory
charged with creating the ideal
author of a new buzz book – The Moral
Molecule.
What drives Zak’s hunger for
human blood is his interest in the
hormone oxytocin, about
which he has become one of
the world’s most prominent experts. Oxytocin,
long known as a female
reproductive hormone
– it plays a central role
in childbirth and
breastfeeding – emerges from Zak’s
research as something much more allembracing: the ‘‘moral molecule’’ behind
all human virtue, trust, affection and
love, ‘‘a social glue’’, as he puts it, ‘‘that
keeps society together’’. The subtitle of
his book, ‘‘The new science of what
makes us good or evil’’, gives a sense of
the scale of his ambition, which involves
nothing less than explaining whole
swaths of philosophical and religious
questions by reference to a single chemical in the bloodstream.
Being treated decently, it turns out,
causes people’s oxytocin levels to rise,
which in turn prompts them to behave
more decently, while experimental
subjects given an artificial oxytocin boost
– by means of an inhaler – behave more
generously and trustingly. And it’s not
solely because of its effects on humans
that oxytocin is known as ‘‘the cuddle
hormone’’: for example, male meadow
voles, normally roguishly promiscuous in
their interactions with female meadow
voles, become passionately monogamous when their oxytocin levels are
raised in the lab.
The aforementioned wedding took
place at a country house in south-west
England where Zak set up a temporary
research station. He took blood samples,
before and after the wedding vows from
the bride and groom, close family
members and various friends in attendance then flew his spoils – 156 test tubes
packed in dry ice – to his laboratory at
Claremont University, in southern California. There he discovered the results he
had been expecting: the ceremony
caused oxytocin to rise in the guests. And
it did so in spookily subtle ways: the bride
recorded the highest increase, followed
by close family members, then less closely involved friends, ‘‘in direct proportion to the likely intensity of emotional
engagement in the event’’. (Only the
groom bucked the trend: testosterone
interferes with oxytocin, and his
testosterone was surging.) Mapping the
wedding’s oxytocin levels gave rise, in
Zak’s vivid phrase, to a human ‘‘solar
system’’ with the bride as the sun, the
hormone finely calibrated to the
emotional warmth each guest felt. ‘‘It was
amazing,’’ Zak recalls. ‘‘Just this perfect
sense of how oxytocin attunes to the
environment.’’
The starting point was a persistent
mystery in Zak’s original field,
economics: time and again in experiments people behave more generously
than traditional economic models
predict they should. A classic
demonstration of this is
known as the Trust
Game, in which
These findings have striking implications for how we think about
morality. Economists tend to
pride themselves on being hardheaded realists: morality might
be a nice set of ideas about how
people ought to behave, this
way of thinking goes, but
economics is the analysis of
how they really behave, motivated not by stirring ethical
values but by the desire for
personal gain. Perhaps
ironically, religions
tend to share a
similar view: that
He recommends
a minimum eight
hugs a day. Even
soppy movies seem
to work: he has done
the blood tests.
Being treated
decently, it turns
out, causes
people’s oxytocin
levels to rise.
pairs of participants communicate with
each other via computer terminals: they
never meet and have no idea who the
other person is.
Person A is given £10 ($15) then invited
to send a portion of it electronically to
person B. Person A has a motive for doing
so: according to the rules, which both
players know about, any money A sends
to B will triple in value, whereupon B will
have the option of sending some of it
back as a thank-you. According to
conventional notions of rational behaviour, the game should break down
before it has begun. Person B, acting selfishly, has no reason to give any money
back – and, knowing this, person A
shouldn’t send any over in the first place.
Yet, in trials of the game, 90 per cent of
A-people send money and 95 per cent of
B-people send some back. Analysis of the
Interactions on Twitter
and Facebook seem to
lead to oxytocin surges.
oxytocin in their bloodstreams reveals
what is going on: by sending money to
person B, person A is giving a sign of trust
– and being on the receiving end of a sign
of trust, it emerges, causes oxytocin to
increase, motivating more generous
behaviour in return.
And it is not just receiving money that
causes people to feel oxytocin’s warm
glow: in other studies Zak has conducted,
random windfalls don’t cause nearly so
much of it to be released. What counts is
being trusted: trust in one person triggers
oxytocin in the other, which triggers more
trustworthy behaviour, and so on, in a
virtuous circle. ‘‘Well, that’s except for the
5 per cent of people who are ‘unconditional non-reciprocators’,’’ says Zak,
referring to the consistent minority of
people who seem immune to this cycle.
‘‘What we call them in my lab is
‘bastards’.’’
moral conduct doesn’t come naturally
but instead needs to be imposed through
fear or the promise of reward. Zak himself
was raised in a staunch Catholic household: his mother, he likes to say, took him
out of Catholic school because it wasn’t
strict enough and ‘‘based her childrearing on the assumption that unselfish,
moral behaviour was impossible without
the ever-present threat of punishment,
the more terrifying the better’’. Yet the
fact that natural selection has given us
oxytocin – a mechanism that allows us to
be instinctively trusting and kind –
suggests that what most of us think of as
‘‘moral’’ is, in fact, part of how we have
evolved to be.
‘‘Human beings are almost the only
animals who regularly want to be around
strange members of our species,’’ Zak
says. ‘‘ It’s fun. But to be able to do that, we
have to have something in our heads that
says: ‘Oliver is safe, Bob is not safe.’ And
that’s oxytocin – this very old, evolutionarily ancient molecule’’ that helps us
respond to being trusted with just the
right degree of reciprocal trust in
response. Zak’s earlier work had established that trust is a crucial precondition
for economic prosperity (to conduct
transactions, you have to be able to trust
others) but also a result of it (once you’re
no longer fighting for basic subsistence,
you can afford to trust more). Now, he had
located the biological mechanism
through which this all worked. The
Golden Rule – treat others as you’d like to
be treated – is, Zak writes, ‘‘a lesson that
the body already knows’’.
From that follows ... well, everything.
‘‘To me, this is the basis for civilisation: a
bunch of strangers living together,’’ he
says. ‘‘And, once you have civilisation, you
can have specialisation of labour; you can
have surplus; you can have university
professors, and priests, because now you
can afford that, and then you get the
advancement of knowledge.’’
This talk of mixing science and
morality prompts suspicion in some
quarters: just because something is
‘‘natural’’ doesn’t mean it is ‘‘right’’, in an
which moral action takes place, that
holds out the possibility – a cause of
either optimism or alarm, depending on
how you look at it – that by manipulating
oxytocin we might boost the levels of
trust, generosity and ultimately happiness in ourselves and the world at large.
It took Zak two years of wrangling with
the US Food and Drug Administration
and university ethics panels to gain
approval to use oxytocin
inhalers on experimental
subjects. (In the meantime, he
got around the restriction by
experimenting on himself
under the watchful eye of
his wife, a neurologist.) But
while the red tape was
convoluted, the conclusions were not: in exercises
such as the Trust Game,
oxytocin-loaded participants
displayed much greater levels
of trust and generosity than those
who used inhalers filled with a
placebo.
All of which would seem to raise some
troubling questions: what is to stop car
dealers, say, pumping oxytocin into
showrooms, or politicians using it when
canvassing? (A company called Vero Labs
already markets an oxytocin spray it calls
‘‘Liquid Trust’’, aimed both at salespeople and single men on the prowl.) But
Zak waves the matter away: it is incredibly hard to get enough oxytocin into the
bloodstream, which is why he has to get
his subjects to force such large amounts
of vapour up their noses; using it covertly
would never work. Sure, oxytocin can be
stimulated in subtle ways to serve other
people’s agendas, ‘‘but they’re already
doing that. Why do you think they have
cute puppies in toilet paper commercials? To make you feel good.’’
Meanwhile, Zak says, we should all
be doing more to boost oxytocin in
benign ways. He recommends a
minimum of eight hugs a day (pets
count, too); massage and even soppy
movies seem to work: he has done the
blood tests.
Interactions on Twitter and Facebook
seem to lead to oxytocin surges, offering
a powerful retort to the argument that
social media is killing real human interaction: in hormonal terms, it appears,
the body processes it as an entirely real
kind of interaction.
Ultimately, one imagines, the
oxytocin-savvy citizens of Zak’s of utopia
would focus on charity work and
community groups, play with their pets
and watch romantic comedies. They
would be touchy-feely and hug each
other all the time – which makes you
wonder whether in the modern world the
prescriptions of Dr Love might be a bit of
a lost cause.
Guardian News & Media
It helps us
respond to being
trusted with just
the right degree of
reciprocal trust.
ethical sense, and efforts to derive codes
of moral conduct from science rarely end
well. Moreover, it is unclear what Zak
means when he says oxytocin, or the lack
of it, ‘‘makes’’ us good or evil. This is the
same problem as with news reports about
scientists discovering the part of the
brain ‘‘responsible for’’ risk-taking, or
greed, or a belief in God: just because you
have found the biological underpinnings
of some phenomenon, it does not necessarily follow that you have found ‘‘the real
cause’’ of it. Still, none of that undermines the most potent aspect of Zak’s
work, which is the pragmatic one. If
oxytocin is the mechanism through
balance
At Blackmores we believe in living a balanced life for happiness, health and wellbeing.
For tools, tips and personalised advice visit blackmores.com.au or find us on
80 years young and many
1HERSA1 A012
to come
hen the Dostoevsky subway station opened in
Moscow in 2010, there was concern that the
grim scenes from Dostoevsky’s novels, artistically depicted on the grey marble walls
(Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov about to murder the
old woman with an axe, the troubled protagonist of
Demons holding a gun to his head), were so depressing that
people, overwhelmed by the bleakness, would start
throwing themselves onto the tracks.
Fortunately, the feared rash of suicides has not materialised. This could be because people do not make those
kinds of decisions based on subway art. Or it could be
because Russians have a different attitude about happiness than most Westerners. One recent study shows they
tend to have darker, more negative thoughts. They also
worry less about those feelings and thus experience fewer
depressive symptoms than Americans. Russians might
brood more, but they don’t dwell that much on their
brooding. Americans, on the other hand, brood about their
worrying and end up more depressed than the Russians.
It is, perhaps, a simple fact of life in the West: we expect
to be happy. The right to pursue happiness is part of
America’s Declaration of Independence, after all. The
feeling has been heightened by the booming field of
‘‘happiness studies’’, which has produced a flow of news
stories and books about what will and will not make us
happy, about the happiest places to live, and about how to
structure our lives so we can be happy almost all the time.
Some important findings have emerged. Too many
choices lead to dissatisfaction. Chronic pain has a more
negative impact than a single accident. We habituate
quickly to our acquisitions. A good marriage is worth about
$100,000 a year in terms of how happy it makes us.
But this headlong rush towards happiness might backfire.
Could our constant worrying about why we are not happy be
making us more miserable than if we simply accepted some
occasional unhappiness as part of life? In viewing unhappiness as a problem to be solved, might we not miss what a
little sadness has to offer us? Are we trading long-term
satisfaction for feeling good now? Buying our present-day
enjoyment at the cost of future meaning?
Children are a case in point. Recently, there has been a
spate of news stories stating that having children does not
increase one’s happiness by any objective measure.
Indeed, marital satisfaction declines steeply when kids are
born and does not recover until they leave.
Having two young children, I can more or less confirm this
is true. Yet despite all the headaches, sleep deprivation,
stained furniture and
general crabbiness, few
parents I know regret their
decision. One study even
found that mothers
between 36 to 44 were less
likely to be depressed than
their childless peers, even
if, at a given point on a
given day, they might be less happy. Raising kids is not nonstop fun. But eventually (we hope) we’ll be better for it.
This jibes with the conclusions of some earlier research.
In the 1980s, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found
that people did not report their most satisfying experiences
as relaxing on the beach, or going to parties, or buying that
car they had always wanted. The happy moments came
when they were working hard at something, moving toward
some goal they had, being challenged and absorbed and
focused. A more recent investigation from the Journal of
Happiness Studies also found that people who were working
hard to accomplish something felt more stress in the
moment but were happier in the long term.
Suffering is no fun and we usually try to avoid it. But it is
also inevitable. Not so long ago, when life was less certain
and comfortable, people understood that suffering could
be an opportunity to rise to a challenge. They were willing
to at least try to extract some meaning from it.
When I lived abroad, I went through what’s known as
culture shock – a series of mood swings that occur as you
learn to function in another culture.
As you find ways to cope, you become a new person –
someone stronger, more capable, more aware. As you
struggle with culture shock, or any of life’s difficulties,
something remarkable happens: you grow.
For a while, I did not understand this. I could not fathom
why I had developed an odd nostalgia for what I remembered
as a hard and unhappy time. But that was precisely the time
when I stopped being the person I
had been and started
becoming the person I
am. Now, when I recall
those unhappy days,
I think of them as
the best days of
my life.The
As you find ways to
cope, you become
a new person.
Rotarian
Support was provided by ‘What Women
Want’ call-outs, promoting survey
participation, coupled with Blackmores
advertising within Sunday Life throughout
the duration of the campaign.
Case Study
Bespoke content and creative
02
04
Sunday Life Covers and
Editorial
‘What Women Want’
Sunday Life - Special Edition
Unique Sunday Life covers were designed
using Blackmores’ green brand colouring,
together with special Editor’s Letters and
engaging ‘What I know about..’ editorial
pieces. These highlighted personal
experiences, views and opinions of the
opposite sex, by Ben Folds, Marjorie Bligh,
Nick Earls and John Taylor.
The results of the ‘What Women Want’
survey were published in a special Sunday
Life edition on Nov 18th 2012. The special
issue, in partnership with Blackmores,
was filled with loads of wellbeing content
relevant to the findings of the survey.
03
Fairfax Media - Blackmores
Wellbeing Section
To continue engagement, a new
wellbeing page was created specifically
for Blackmores within The Sydney
Morning Herald and The Age. Inspired by
the ‘What Women Want’ campaign, this
regular column discussed relevant topics
covering the body, mind and soul.
Case Study
06
Reader Event
Smashing Results
05
Female’s likelihood to recommend
Blackmores Caltrate Vitamin D shifted
significantly: +16% pts
‘What Women Want’ Reader Event
Impressive Results.
Purchase Intention +9% pts
A special event was held at Sydney’s The Ivy on Nov
12th 2012, hosted by Jessica Rowe and sponsored by
Blackmores, attracting over 100 Sunday Life and Daily Life
readers.
Brand Favourability +9% pts
Brand Recommendation +7% pts
Brand Consideration +6% pts
An invitation was promoted within Sunday Life and on
Daily Life, to encourage readers to attend.
Fairfax Media - Blackmores
Guest speakers on the panel included; Jacinta Tynan,
Jane Caro, Kerri Sackville, Tara Moss, Emily Maguire and
Paula Joye, who discussed body and health, sex and
relationships, family, career, money and more.
“
Exposure to the campaign in The Age, The Sydney Morning
Herald and Sunday Life magazine helped Blackmores
maintain its top ranking in the competitive set.
”
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT
Anna Lenart on (02) 9282 1193