As anyone who's ever glimpsed a B&Q commercial will tell you, using
a company's employees in a campaign is far from a new strategy. Yet 2001
has seen an unprecedented number of staffers take centre stage in
high-profile ads. The past 12 months has seen many employees becoming
their company's brand.
Throughout the 80s, retail outlets proved themselves willing to use
staff as cheap mouthpieces for simple tactical messages. B&Q didn't need
a great thespian performer to emote the joy of realising you could get
two wallpaper rolls for the price of one and Asda didn't need a sitcom
star to feign excitement at the prospect of how much you could save on
frozen chicken breasts. Staff performers could fill these roles
efficiently enough, yet companies rarely thought of getting any further
mileage out of them.
"In the past there's been quite a paternalistic and almost patronising
use of staff," Delaney Lund Knox Warren & Partners' managing partner,
Tom Knox, says. "It was thought that it was perhaps a good idea to use
them to portray either service or price but never as proper advertising
vehicles."
Nor was a company likely to use actors to portray staff on screen. Not
only was it a waste of money, but you also ran the risk of offending
employees by presenting them in an unfavourable light - or simply
isolating them from the message. When Sainsbury's ran its unfortunate
Basil Fawlty-style John Cleese ads through Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, it
wasn't just the public who were complaining. On the whole it was
understandable for staff to take the hump at the way they were
presented.
When playing themselves, they were treated as slightly simple, greatly
enthusiastic worker ants with no character of their own. Usually they
got a couple of seconds of screen time each.
"They weren't stars," Knox says. "They're talking heads, you don't know
who they are. I'll bet when B&Q staff talk to their mates down the pub,
their mates take the piss out of them for being in the ads."
The ads produced by DLKW for the Halifax this year signalled that such
embarrassments may be coming to an end. Performing employees have
escaped the territory of cheap retail ads and are delivering complex
messages in multimillion-pound branding campaigns. Howard Brown did this
so effectively in the Halifax work that he's since become a celebrity
within the building society itself, opening stores around the
country.
"The great thing about a campaign that uses real staff is that it has an
internal effect that's way beyond that of a normal advertising
campaign," Knox says. "The workforce feels it has ownership of what the
campaign's about."
Yet the change in advertising's attitude toward staff is not restricted
to giving real employees more interesting things to do. The character of
a company's staff is now considered so important that entire scripts are
written around them and actors and stuntmen are hired to portray them on
screen. The personality and dynamism of the workforce now seems
essential to the branding message of a growing number of
advertisers.
This is particularly clear in AMV's new ad for Fed Ex. You'd expect a
courier service to concentrate on explaining how many days it takes them
to get your stuff from A to B - or how much it costs.
Instead, the two spots launched by AMV this week are built entirely
around the fictitious recruitment of individuals - raising them, in the
process, to heroic status. It's no longer enough for Fed Ex to be seen
as a giant corporate machine taking on and spitting out packages across
the globe.
The company wants potential customers to see its staff as caring deeply
and individually about each item entrusted to their care.
There seems to be a degree of reverse psychology operating here. The
ability of a company's staff to do the job has gone from being an
assumption readily made by most customers to a crucial point of
differentiation. It's not that we expect package handlers to go to the
ends of the earth for our deliveries. It's rather that we dread the
opposite and have experience of crucial packages lost or delayed to back
up our concern. It's easy to present Fed Ex's elite delivery boys as the
exception rather than the rule - and, consequently, the only choice if
we want things done properly.
"The tactic of using staff is not a new one but it has increased
relevance now," AMV's head of planning, Mike Teesdale, says. "As people
have looked for greater integrity in their choice of brands, companies
have found staff to be an increasingly effective means of portraying
their values."
Members of the workforce have traditionally appeared in ads to talk
about the level of service they offer but they've rarely presented any
real evidence of this. Now companies attempt to present a believable
motive for decent customer service in order to give their claims more
credibility.
Increasingly, working in the corporation's ranks is portrayed as a
vocation - a personal calling that guarantees absolute focus on the task
in hand.
An early version of this approach was the "Fourth Emergency Service" ads
produced by HHCL & Partners for the AA, which is now reviewing its
account. The launch spot showed a child playing with toy cars,
pretending to fix a woman's car at the side of the road. This image
sought to raise our perception of working for road haulage from just
another job to something akin to driving a squad car.
Now this might just be believable of the AA. However, the current trend
in using employees to communicate a company's integrity has extended the
idea to areas that are far more of a stretch. Roose & Partners' work for
TXU Energi, again from this year, attempts to convince us that the staff
filling their telephone centres are so pathologically dedicated to
helping customers that even in their own time they automatically go out
of their way to help strangers.
When pushed too far, the idea of the dedicated employee becomes an easy
target for parody. Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy's new work for
Benecol, which broke last week, has the TXUs of this world in its sights
when it presents a salesman, Stefan, so obsessed with his product's
qualities that he is oblivious to the reaction of the general
public.
"There is something very engaging about Stefan's enthusiasm," MCBD's
creative director, Malcolm Duffy, insists. "He disarms us with his
passion."
However, Stefan also shows just how ridiculous images of evangelical
employees can be when they outstrip reality.
TXU, like Fed Ex, is an American company introducing a stubborn US
vision of customer service to the British market. In the States,
companies expected the internet revolution to increase dramatically the
potential level of customer service that they would be able to provide.
As more problems were solved via online enquiries, the theory ran,
telephone operators would be freed up to deal with our queries more
efficiently. This area, traditionally one of the weak links in their
customer relations, would be transformed into a crucial selling
point.
Unfortunately, it hasn't really happened that way. US customers have
found that a proliferation of technologies has instead led to a
proliferation of technical problems - with customer service centres
being hopelessly swamped as a result. The image of customer service in
the US has taken an unexpected battering over the past couple of
years.
These difficulties demonstrate the potential problems for TXU in the UK.
The company may have pushed through an extensive training campaign for
its staff but, in all probability, its customers will still experience
considerable frustration when calling in with problems. TXU's
advertising proposition could be undermined by a few bad experiences on
the phone.
Even if TXU's customer service really is flawless, they must still
compete with the public's in-built cynicism about the process. Customers
do not look forward to their dealings with service providers' staff
since they usually result from something going wrong.
Both TXU's good Samaritans and Fed Ex's superhuman couriers have one
final disadvantage. In each case, it is clear that we are dealing with
fictitious employees in fictitious situations - which itself begs a
rather obvious question. If the character of a company's staff is
relevant enough for them to appear in the ads in the first place, then
it could be necessary for the agency to go the whole way. It remains
difficult to persuade the public to trust a company's employees unless
the company itself is prepared to put them in the spotlight.
