REFRAMING

 

 

For the first two years of WW2, Russia was on the Nazi’s side against Britain.

In 1939 the USSR and Germany had signed a non-aggression pact, then Germany invaded Poland from the west, Russia invaded from the east, and they split Poland between them.

Britain went to war with Germany over Poland, newspapers were full of cartoons showing the two leaders united as our enemies – Stalin as the bride and Hitler as the groom.

Russia supplied Germany with the materials they needed to fight Britain: millions of tons of oil, grain, iron-ore, and rubber.

Stalin was seen, alongside Hitler, as Britain’s deadly enemy, up until June 1941 when Hitler invaded Russia with 4 million troops.

Suddenly, Russia was Germany’s enemy.

True to the principle “My enemy’s enemy is my friend” it meant Britain had to supply weapons to Russia to help them fight the Nazis.

This was a difficult situation given Churchill and the media had spent two years telling everyone the Russians were our enemy.

Churchill had to do a very fast volte-face, he had to change Stalin into a trusted ally so the British would be happy sending them tanks and planes via Arctic convoys.

The media was suddenly full of cartoons showing Stalin, with his bushy moustache, as kindly ‘Uncle Joe’ bravely standing up to the Nazis.

Churchill was accused of hypocrisy, but he said: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make a favourable reference to Satan in the House of Commons.”

This is an example of what is known in marketing as ‘reframing’.

Changing the way we frame a product to change the market’s perception of it.

A good example of this in our terms was a drink that was invented in 1927, it was high in glucose so it was called Glucozade.

In 1938 it was bought by Beecham who changed the name to Lucozade and sold it in pharmacies under the slogan “Lucozade aids recovery”, it was a common gift when visiting someone who was sick.

That’s how it was perceived until 1983, when the company used the high glucose content to reframe it as an energy drink.

The advertising featured high-profile sports figures like Daley Thompson and Alan Shearer under the slogan “Lucozade replaces lost energy”.

Sales tripled and it became the UK’s biggest-selling energy drink.

Rory Sutherland cites Rolls Royce advertising as another example of reframing.

You would think the best place to advertise Rolls Royce would be car magazines, but apparently not.

A Rolls can cost well over £250,000, making it look like a very extravagant purchase alongside all the cheaper cars.

So, in order to reframe Rolls, they advertised in luxury boat & yacht magazines.

While £250K may seem a fortune next to cars costing £50K, it seems quite reasonable next to boats costing several million pounds.

Bicycles are another interesting example of reframing.

When I was young, bikes were only for kids and manual workers who couldn’t afford a car to get to work at the factory.

Today, bicycles have been reframed into an ecologically sound mode of transport and a leisure exercise for upmarket, white-collar professionals.

Today a recreational mountain-bike can cost several thousand pounds, they’re not for poor people anymore.

In the 1970s a seafood wholesaler in LA reframed a type of fish.

The Patagonian Toothfish was considered worthless, it was so ugly that fisherman would throw it back.

But Lee Lantz, a wholesaler, changed the name to Chilean Sea Bass.

Customers began to try it and decided it was so tasty that it soon became the most expensive fish on restaurant menus.

The Durex brand of condoms was launched in 1929 (the name being a contraction of durability, reliability, and excellence).

For 50 years it was marketed as a way of preventing pregnancy.

But in 1961 the birth-control pill was launched and fewer people needed to use condoms as contraceptives.

The market for Durex shrank as the need decreased, right up until the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

Suddenly there was a purpose for condoms other than preventing pregnancy.

Durex reframed condoms with an advertising campaign using headlines like: WHEN YOU SLEEP WITH SOMEONE, YOU SLEEP WITH EVERYONE THEY’VE EVER SLEPT WITH.

Durex reframed condoms from pregnancy-prevention to disease-prevention and now they sell 3 billion condoms annually.

More recently Corsodyl reframed their toothpaste.

Previously, toothpaste advertising had been almost exclusively about whitening teeth, all toothpaste ads had to feature a gleaming white Hollywood smile.

But Corsodyl advertising showed a bit of blood in the sink and the question “Do you spit blood when you brush?”

No toothpaste advertising had dared show blood before or talk about how many teeth are lost to gum-disease versus decay.

That reframing increased Corsodyl sales by £50 million within a year.

Instead of concentrating on a solution to an existing problem, it’s often best to reframe the problem.

As Albert Einstein said: “If I had just one hour to save the world I’d spend 50 minutes defining the problem and 10 minutes on the solution.”