BRUT Advert - Evaluation

Towards the end of last year we were tasked with rebranding an existing Unilever product. We started out individually, developing our ideas and eventually giving our ideas to the rest of the class. After that we were put into groups, mine being myself, Vlad, and George. My individual idea was to rebrand Peperami, George's idea was to rebrand BRUT, and Vlad didn't have one. As a result, it was a toss-up between mine and George's idea. After a lesson's deliberating we concluded that George's idea was solid, and easiest to do (mine required gratuitous amounts of Peperamis).  As for target audience,  we had decided to shift the older, overly-manly target audience of BRUT over to younger people, who perhaps aspire to be more of a 'gentleman'. We decided this was a good choice because while, since we're of the same age as the target audience we'd be able to understand them better, and that BRUT appears to have fallen into obscurity among younger audiences.

It wouldn't be marketing if we didn't have feedback, so what we did was wrote surveys to be distributed over social networks like Facebook and Twitter. I used SmartSurvey for mine, I found out how to embed the ad in the survey page, and this proved rather helpful indeed.

Question 1 - What is your age?

Considering my somewhat biased pool of volunteers (equal parts people from my college and people from /r/teenagers on Reddit) most of the people who answered the survey were in the 15-19 age bracket, with just one other person being over 25.

Question 2 - Had you heard of BRUT prior to seeing this advert?

The majority of my participants hadn't heard of it before seeing the ad. 3 had, 15 hadn't.

Question 3 - What was your favourite part of the advert?

Out of all 18 answers (aside from a couple of people who didn't take it seriously), around 5 mention the part where George puts the aftershave on and walks down the stairs as their favourite. This seems to be the strongest part of the ad. A close second place was the end shot with the bottle and the couple out in front.

Question 4 - Would this advert hold your attention for its whole duration if shown on TV?

5 people were unsure, 8 said they'd probably tune out and do other stuff, and 5 said they'd watch it. I'd take these answers with a grain of salt myself, because I know that nowadays adverts can be skipped or ignored, and other distractions are more prominent.

Question 5 - Do you think you could be more of a 'gentleman' like the man in this advert?

Pretty even split on this one, with a slight lean towards 'no'. 8 for yes, 10 for no.

Question 6 - What sort of social class would you say that this was aimed at?

Pretty much unanimously pointing towards 'middle class' for this question. 4 people said 'working class', 3 said 'upper class', and a considerably larger 14 said 'middle class'.

Question 7 - Would you consider yourself part of the target audience for this product?

8 said yes, 10 said no. This is a bit of a surprise, as I had imagined I had asked mostly people who did fall into this target audience, so I wonder why people aren't identifying with the advert.

Question 8 - Do you think this would be a successful campaign if shown on TV?

However, this being said, most of the participants agreed that it would be a successful campaign if it was shown on TV. I don't know whether this is true or not, since my target audience has just admitted they don't identify with the advert.

Question 9 - Would you buy BRUT after seeing this ad?

Mostly no. Which goes to prove that most of our target audience has fallen short of being successful in terms of this advert.

Question 10 - What would you improve about this advert?

There were a couple of bits of constructive criticism in the responses I got, namely some 'less shaky camera', or 'it seemed too long for what it was trying to do'.

Technically, I think we did rather well with our advert. It's certainly nice and professional looking, and would be sure to at least catch some eyes if it were shown on TV. The editing went down well, certainly among our peers when we did the peer review. I think it was the dissolves/slo-mo and the end shot where the Brut is keyed out that won people over in this respect. Camerawork was okay, we didn't have a lot of room to really get a couple of shots we wanted, but I think we did alright with what we had. The shot of George coming down the stairs was a tad shaky (according to almost unanimous feedback) but unfortunately there is little we could do about that short from having a camera track, crane, or EZ Rig, but money is tight when you're a student. I think our mise-en-scene really came into its own in the shot where the drawer that has the BRUT in is opened. At the very least, we put the most effort into the mise-en-scene at this point in the advert. We had tried to think of stereotypically 'dad-like' things we could find around the room, and I think we found some appropriate items. It was certainly noted in feedback that this particular shot was rather effective.

In terms of the storyline and how well it achieves its goal of selling the product, I would say that in itself the advert was an enjoyable watch, and the storyline does pertain to helping sell the product (BRUT helps the boy smell good and go to prom when he's in a tight spot).

As far as persuasion techniques go, I think we did a good job. Firstly, there's a loud-ish part at the beginning to grab audience's attention ('JUST GET OFF ME, MUM'), then we have a character with which hopefully our target audience can relate and identify, who then overcomes a problem which many of us have using the product we are trying to sell.

In keeping with the tried and tested formula of TV adverts known as AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action), our advert gets attention with the aforementioned loud noise, interest with the 'I've got just the thing you need, son' because people are curious as to what the 'thing' is, desire because of the boy's change in popularity throughout the course of the advert, people want to be popular and attractive, and action because of the end plate. We show the product at the end, so people know what they have to do to get the product, so that inspires action.

Since it was aimed at young lads, we decided it would be best to employ a young lad in the lead role, and the slight awkward relationship he has with his mother is something we guessed would be a common problem among our target audience.

The problem with doing storyboards and plans before actually having a good look at the location is that we get an idea in our heads of how we want the advert to look, and more times than not the actual location does not agree with this plan. Because of this, the advert doesn't exactly fit our proposed plan, but we made it look as good as we could with the location.

These things always require working in a team, and that can sometimes get rather stressful. Here, however, was rather smooth as far as teamwork is concerned. Occasionally people didn't pull their weight, but that is okay because we all made sure we were all involved.

Personally, I feel like I fell into the role of director again, but that's not too much of a problem because I seem to be rather good at it.