The Sauce – 19/03/2024

Welcome to ‘The Sauce’ – your weekly dollop of marketing news.

By Ashleigh Morris, our Content and Comms Lead.

Welcome to ‘The Sauce’ – your dollop of marketing news from the past week.

This week we’re talking about Innocent’s new campaign, Decathlon’s rebrand, and gender bias in marketing

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Innocent’s Immersive Campaign

Innocent is going underground! The drinks company has launched its latest innovative campaign ‘We Love the Underground’ to celebrate the importance of healthy soil in sustaining our favourite fruits and veggies.

The immersive out-of-home experience will run for two weeks and features at the Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road and Farringdon underground stations, giving travellers the opportunity to dive deep into the earth, discovering the crucial role soil plays in our food production.

The campaign consists of digital displays and escalator ribbons which give the illusion of travelling down through the fertile ground. On-platform displays give passengers the chance to interact via a QR code to receive free seeds and find out more about Innocent’s work to protect soil health.

The campaign seamlessly weaves together Innocent’s brand story with a wider message about sustainability and soil health. Innocent is a great example of a company who always showcases innovative yet meaningful marketing, demonstrating their brand values in a fun way that resonates with consumers.

We’re encouraging more of our clients to align their marketing strategies with a meaningful cause, building stronger connections with ideal customers.

Want to work with a full-service marketing agency for your next campaign? Drop me an email to find out how we can help: ashleigh@awesomesaucemarketing.co.uk.

The campaign seamlessly weaves together Innocent’s brand story with a wider message about sustainability and soil health.

Rebrand for Decathlon Ahead of Olympics

Sports retailer Decathlon has revealed a refresh to its brand identity ahead of the Paris Olympics later this year.

The French company has launched an updated visual identity and marketing strategy, as it aims to position itself as a “global sports brand” in its own right.

This isn’t just a quick logo update – Decathlon has worked with global brand consultancy Wolff Olins on a two-year transformation.

As a brand in its own right and also a retailer of other brands, Decathlon has taken its time to make sure it gets the positioning right to align its in-house brands with the overarching Decathlon brand.

At Awesomesauce we talk a lot about customer research and identifying your target audience, and we love the attention to detail in this example. After conducting research into the role that sport has within people’s lives and how Decathlon could fit into that, the team created a new brand strapline ‘Make sport yours’, underlining that sport is for everyone, not just athletes.

As well as a refresh of its traditional wordmark logo, the brand has revealed a new logo called L’Orbit which will appear across various touchpoints and the products themselves.

Decathlon has taken this rebrand seriously with a new visual identity, verbal identity and positioning. With such a significant investment in sponsorship of the Olympics later this year, now is the perfect time for them to launch their new identity – we can expect to see the brand everywhere later this year, and always see a boost in the appeal of sports around the time of the Olympics.

I knew Mark, our Art & Digital Director, would love to give us his view, so I asked him for his thoughts. He said, “Visually, the new identity is strong – it’s more dynamic and has an active feel. It’s feels as if it’s elevating the brand, aiming to position it as more premium.

“The unique L’Orbit icon will translate well to signage and own-brand clothing, and the curve within the icons reflects the CA in the main logo which is a nice touch.”

Ready to give your brand a refresh? Email Mark on mark@awesomesaucemarketing.co.uk. We promise it won’t take two years!

The unique L’Orbit icon will translate well to signage and own-brand clothing, and the curve within the icons reflects the CA in the main logo which is a nice touch.

Gender Bias in Advertising

Vaila Robertson got us all talking in the office this week. Her article for Marketing Week looked at how gender biases could be impacting brands’ creativity and really got us thinking.

In the article Vaila looks at how gender stereotypes are deeply ingrained in our society, and in advertising.

She referred to a study from the Cannes Lions archive which showed that men get around four times more screen time than women, and ads featuring only men were five times more common than ads with only women. The figures remained consistent for the period of the study from 2006-2016. (For an in-depth examination of how we as a society got to this point, you can check out Vaila’s full article on Marketing Week here.)

We were pretty shocked by these stats, but the good news is that things are changing. We live in a more visually oriented world than ever before and with the average person seeing 10,000 advertising images a day, we as marketers are in a pretty powerful position to address stereotypes and challenge traditional ways of working.

Have you considered how you can address gender bias in your advertising? Drop us an email on hello@awesomesaucemarketing.co.uk to find out how our diverse team could help.

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Same time next week? In the meantime, you can check out previous editions of ‘The Sauce’ here.

Brought to you by Awesomesauce Marketing – a full-service marketing agency serving UK and international clients.