Q&A with Laura Jones, Strategy Partner, Joint

Q: What are the challenges associated with creating adverts for a premium brand such as The Collective?

The premium brand market is highly competitive making it crucial for brands to stand out. The vast majority of premium brands have a more serious slant to their creative work. And while this seriousness does often equate to luxury’s place in the market and how it is perceived, it doesn’t fit with The Collective’s vibrant personality.

So the challenge was to maintain premium cues while bringing the brand’s playful persona to the forefront. By seamlessly merging these two elements, we could bring the brand to life in the best possible way.

Q: What are the opportunities that come with working with such a brand?

The Collective is an innovative, well-respected and loved brand that brings with it bold branding, a playful personality and undeniably delicious products. This is the kind of brand we love at Joint as it provides ample opportunity for creating exciting and emotionally engaging work to truly stand out in the category.

Q: What most excites you about The Collective brief and how did you come up with the creative for the campaign?

The Collective brief was exciting in its simplicity – this is all about epic tasting yoghurts.

We delved into the taste of the product and used social listening to gather insights from real consumers on how people eat these yoghurts, how they talk about them, what they feel about them, and what role the product plays in their everyday lives.

It also helped that we had some Collective yoghurt superfans in the office. So, writing about how amazing it tasted actually came pretty naturally.

Q: How did you ensure that The Collective’s products stood out against competition?

The Collective’s products really do quite simply speak for themselves.  From their gourmet pots with a double layer of compote to their delicious dairy-free alternatives, the products shine through in a world of boring, bland gloop. The innovative and disruptive approach to flavours, product composition and packaging formats really does set them apart from any other yoghurt in the category. When the product is that good, we just need to tell people about it.

Q: Are there challenges associated with targeting such a wide range of audiences with a wide range of products, e.g. ‘gourmet pots’ and ‘suckies pouches’

Clearly with such a range of audiences and products, we needed to balance the messaging between them and make sure the work was relevant to who we were targeting. We saw this as an excellent opportunity to write insight-based lines that would speak to specific audiences, as opposed to throwing one message out to appeal to every single demographic.

As previously mentioned, we used social-insights to gather information on how people used The Collective’s products in their day-to-day lives. Our gourmet lines leaned into specific insights gathered around the common eventuality of eating a whole pot to yourself, inspiring lines such as ‘And when I came to, the whole thing was gone’, while our suckies lines, like ‘a moment’s peace without hiding in the loo’ and ‘silence without suspicion’, talk directly to parents, leaning on real parenting insights.

We took this targeted approach one step further on our social media adverts, where these lines have been directed at specific audience groups to make them hyper relevant.

Q: How did you make sure that The Collective’s messaging, personality and tone of voice came across in the 2023 masterbrand campaign

We wrote short, impactful lines that truly conveyed the confident, playful personality of the brand. We then tested the messaging on real people to ensure that the campaign landed with the best, and biggest impact. We focused on the lines that made people smile the most to create a memorable and engaging campaign.