Did I miss something? Mr Muscle now has muscles.
While making myself a mid-afternoon cuppa in the Naked kitchen the other day, I was distracted by a garish orange bottle standing on the worktop. It was a bottle of Mr Muscle kitchen surface cleaner. But what made it stand out for me wasn’t the lurid colour scheme but the picture of the brand icon on the label: Mr Muscle himself.
The thing is, he bore no relation to the Mr Muscle of my advertising memories. As far as I thought I knew, Mr Muscle is a puny weakling of a man, so feeble and spindly-limbed that he is incapable of scrubbing off difficult stains or burnt-on food residues. Hence the brand’s benefit: cleaning power that’s so super-strong that even a weakling like him can get the job done properly.
Yet looking at the label on the counter it was clear that Mr Muscle had undergone a metamorphosis. Gone was the seven stone weakling in shorts and a singlet, replaced by a CGI’d superhero with a six pack, pert pecs and biceps of steel.
At first this struck me as some kind of travesty. It was a complete strategic and creative volte-face. I felt mildly upset that such an entertainingly ironic campaign which drew on the tradition of gentle British humour had been sacrificed on the altar of global brand alignment (or whatever) to make room for the new superhero who was had a total charm and humour bypass.
But on further reflection I wondered if it actually tells us something about the way TV advertising works these days.
Looking back at past IPA Effectiveness Awards entries I saw that the original campaign (which began in 1986) was most definitely a success. So much so that the ‘Mr Puny’ character was used continuously for about 20 years, surviving a change in agencies along the way. Yet SC Johnson, the brand owners, chose to change him. Why?
No doubt SC Johnson had been tracking the campaign’s performance throughout its lifetime. What I imagine had been happening is that its effectiveness was beginning to wane. If you’re barely paying attention, the passive take-out is weedy character = weedy product. By changing Mr Muscle into someone who actually has muscles, the low attention take-out is a positive symbol of product efficacy. This is surely an example of Dr. Robert Heath’s low attention processing at work.
The original Mr Muscle campaign was a classic example of idea-based advertising, where the message unfolds in the viewer’s mind as they decrypt the ironic logic of a puny man who can clean the toughest stains. The consumer is credited with the intelligence to work it out for themselves.
But in today’s fragmented, second-screen, continuous-partial-attention world, SC Johnson can no longer rely on the viewer devoting the small but necessary attention span to decode the irony. The idea-based campaign no longer outperforms a simpler, cruder personification of the product’s power.
If the change in Mr Muscle was made with good reason, based on robust research evidence (which seems a reasonable assumption for a such a successful business as SC Johnson), then this is a symptom of the long term changes in how we watch TV advertising. We can no longer rely on viewers bothering to concentrate enough to get the idea.
I’m sorry to see the old Mr Muscle go. I hate the generic, muscular replacement. But the advertising nostalgist (is that a word?) inside me is even sadder to see such a clear-cut landmark signalling the end of the golden age of TV advertising.
Will Collin
Planning Partner