Oh my god, the suspense was killing me there. This ad is pretty hi-larious, but to laugh at of course, unless whoever wrote this was using an intentionally bad joke as some sort of complex irony. There are a few more similar ads within the campaign, and I must say, it’s quite an interesting niche they’ve picked for their target group: white, middle-aged, unemployed, single-fathers (with daughters – strictly no sons allowed in the campaign) who could never quite hack the mysteries of tie tying. In fairness, tie tying is hard enough to say, let alone do.
The bad:
Even though the ad emphasises our transformed hero’s confidence, surprisingly, an ad like this would actually work better by showing the cons of not dying your hair, rather than the pros of dying it. A couple of chaps called Kahneman and Tversky bagged a Nobel Prize for their work on ‘Prospect Theory’, which basically states that when people are confronted with losses, they won’t mind taking risks to avoid them, but when confronted with gains, they’ll act risk-aversely when trying to reach those gains.
In advertising, researchers used this theory to figure out that when people are worried about something (like grey hair), a message that emphasises the losses of not taking action (like what would happen if you kept your current hair colour) will be the most effective in persuading them. Since most people who want to dye to their hair are worried about their current hair colour in the first place, I’m guessing the cons about going grey would have worked a lot better than the pros of dying. That guy should never have been allowed to make it past the tie tying.
The good:
Although the “more ties” joke doesn’t really do any favours for the Just for Men brand, it provides a great laugh for people browsing YouTube or Stumbleupon. I know this isn’t beneficial for Just for Men, but it is for me. Also, it has to be said, in a market like the one for men’s hair-products, where you don’t really go searching for brands (instead, brands come to you with their omnipresent advertising), creating awareness and basically shoving your brand name in people’s faces is just as important as creating a good ad – that is, of course, for the advertisers and not the audience.
Just for Men might have done a better job of getting people to the shops with scarier stories of staying grey, but at least they’ve got a classical conditioning effect going on between happy emotions and their brand. By creating these happy emotions consistently across their campaign, the emotions can eventually become ‘unconsciously’ associated with the Just for Men brand, which could work well to persuade men who are already knee-deep in the hair-dying scene. And yes, they did try to create this same emotion consistently throughout the campaign. I’ll let you go with another cringe-worthy episode of the ‘Daddy’s girls’ campaign from our friends at Just for Men.
