Marks & Spencers have recently launched a new take on their famous ‘This is not just food’ campaign and it’s brilliant.

It features the classic line that everyone now knows and associates with M&S, they turn the concept on its head and have everyday people taking the mickey out of their tagline, while serving up M&S dishes at home.

It’s clever, bold and not afraid to poke fun at itself, but upon watching it, it made me realise just how long the ‘This is not just food’ campaign has been running and made me think that there might come a point when an ad concept transcends ‘campaign’ status and joins ‘brand identity’ status.

Back in 2004 M&S launched their now famous ‘This is not just food, this is M&S food’ television ad campaign. One of the most iconic adverts at the beginning of the campaign featured the melt-in-the-middle chocolate pudding. When aired, the ad increased sales of the product by 3000%!

So it’s fairly safe to say the campaign was a huge success. It ran on and off for years after that, sometimes with other smaller campaigns taking the limelight but mostly, this campaign ended up becoming something that everyone thinks of when you mention M&S food.

Typically an ad campaign is a one-off thing. It is the overall concept, under which a series of adverts run across different media. It might have only one multimedia wave, or several, but often will run for a fixed period of time, such as a Summer Sale or a Christmas Event.

A successful campaign will focus on something, whether that be a specific service or sale to highlight, a seasonal offering or a new product, to name a few. Usually, to achieve this, the campaign needs an identity of it’s own and this is where the interesting part comes in.

A campaign identity is separate from a brand identity and can quite often have completely different styling to the main brand it sits under. Equally, it can be very in-keeping with the main brand, it depends on what it is trying to achieve.

Take the Tesco ‘Food Love Stories’ campaign for example. It had its own handwriting style identity, but very much sat in sync with the main Tesco’s brand.

Then on the opposite end take the 2D animated Christmas ad, Waitrose put out in 2013. Disney style cartoon characters acting as mascots, had never featured in Waitrose’s branding and they never have since.

This is the beauty of a campaign identity, as long as it doesn’t clash with the core ethos of your brand you can (almost) do what you want, because it won’t be around forever. If an agency or marketing department comes up with a radical and bold idea for an ad campaign using, artwork, fonts, photography and messaging that has never been used by the brand before, that can be ok! If it’s the best way to sell what the campaign is selling!

So that’s a campaign in a nutshell, and we all know what a brand is. But how does a campaign become part of a brand, how does it end up as a permanent part of the identity of the brand?

Well, the short answer is; when it’s really good! But there are plenty of brilliant campaigns out there that haven’t become part of their brands like the M&S campaign has. This is because more often than not campaigns are designed to run for a fixed/short period of time. You couldn’t have your amazing ‘Summer Sale’ campaign running through winter no matter how awesomely designed and successful it was!

These sorts of campaigns have to be crafted to last, to be designed to run for longer, and to achieve that, the concept has to be even cleverer.

The idea has to function all year round, over the top of a wide range of events, seasons, messages and functions. It needs to work without specific imagery or fonts or layouts or anything. It has to be a lone idea that works without needing to be explained, without a large amount of scene-setting context.

It must be broad but not vague. It must say everything but not too much. It must be clever, memorable, short and concise. Easy right? No, not really.

Here at Holla we designed a long-term campaign identity for Euronics. They wanted to highlight the expertise of their employees, their knowledge and skill above their competitors. We created the line ‘We’re switched on’ a pun that plugged nicely into their product offering and we served it up as a button device that could be placed nearly anywhere.

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For a few years this campaign became part of the Euronics brand identity, signing off all of their advertising, even as badges on their employees uniforms. It became part of Euronics, even when other campaigns were running. The Summer Sale might be on and there might be a selection of great deals, but above it all sat the message that Euronics employees knew their stuff.

So too does the ‘This is not just food’ tagline from M&S. With just one line, ‘This is not just food, this is M&S food’ the customer is told that M&S’s food is special, that they go above and beyond. And no matter what other campaign or message is running, this line can still apply and sit above it.

Not only that, it’s arrogant, in a funny sort-of way, and very quotable. It’s a campaign that sticks long term because it was designed to, but also because it’s very good. The campaign is just a line, it doesn’t need specific imagery and it contains the brand’s name within it for added brevity.

‘This is not just an ad, it’s an expertly crafted long-term campaign identity that blends flawlessly with the main brand’.

Not quite as catchy as theirs.

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