Breaking Taboos
How breaking convention pays out
By Samira Brophy • 10 mins read
Red liquid and sanitary products, women sweating, differently shaped bodies, men holding hands. Breaking a taboo is a highly emotive act and when done with craft, confidence, empathy and creativity, can drive more effective business outcomes for brands.
Key takeaways:
1
Brands that break taboos go against the category norm. Ipsos ad testing data shows that defying category conventions gives advertisers a +21% bump in ad attention.
2
Breaking taboos is a highly emotive subject1 with risks and rewards. It is understandable if brands are concerned about backlash when it is a growing concern for all. To illustrate this, in the UK, there has been a +107% increase in fear of backlash over speaking up for women’s rights.
3
Empathy and surprise are the strongest predictors of long-term brand growth. Stories around taboo breaking lend themselves well to surprise and when told with empathy are powerful drivers of positive business outcomes.
Campaigns can elicit different emotions to effectively break taboos. For example:
The ‘Bum’s the Word’ campaign used a bold, humorous approach to broach the taboo topic of piles and grew category sales +64%, with the product launch winning 77% market share in two years.
‘The Last Photo’ challenged preconceptions about suicide and increased demand for CALM's helpline by 16.56%, which helped prevent 161 suicides.
‘The Hidden Lifesavers’ combined shock and empathy, increasing the proportion of drug users carrying a potentially lifesaving Naxolone kit by 45%.
‘Have A Word’ took a bold, strong stand on harassment of women. Of male campaign viewers, 85% said they would call out misogyny if they saw it.
Breaking taboos is not just about using shock tactics or provoking a reaction in your audience. When it’s done well and for the right reasons, it enables brands to finally ditch the clichés and get closer to representing the reality of life."
Vicki Maguire
Chief Creative Officer, Havas London
Remember when most ads for sanitary pads showed a beakerful of blue ink soaking into a pad to show absorbency? I remember all the brands blurring into one – pardon the pun – sanitised, snooze fest of wings, glass beakers and ladies in white trousers.
We didn’t question it for the longest time because periods were seen as something shameful, disgusting or at the extreme end of the spectrum unlucky to be around. A classmate of mine in India was ritually locked up and isolated when on her period, with meals passed under the door because she was considered ‘impure’.
In 2017, Essity brand Bodyform did something amazing. They showed red blood-like liquid being soaked up by a pad and running down someone’s leg in their #bloodnormal campaign.
They got our attention. Why? Because breaking a taboo is a highly emotive act and when done with craft, confidence, empathy and creativity, can drive more effective business outcomes for brands. And we know from Ipsos datasets that expressing empathy, grounded on a human truth and combined with craft and creativity, is an effective strategy that can deliver +20% short-term sales lift effects vs. average. You can also read more on bridging the Empathy gap.
They got our attention. Why? Because breaking a taboo is a highly emotive act and when done with craft, confidence, empathy and creativity, can drive more effective business outcomes for brands.
The risk of breaking taboos
A taboo is something that is prohibited by social custom. Going against social custom has risks in a highly social world where a lie will run halfway around the planet while the truth is still getting its boots on. Brands are fearful of being tone deaf, cancelled, or blindsided by backlash.
But brands are not alone, many of us live with this fear.
In the UK, there has been a +107% increase in fear of backlash over speaking up for women’s rights. This is likely generalisable for both genders as well as disability, age, ethnicity, body positivity, inequality, immigration, and other topics that have been weaponised in the culture wars. Incidentally, when we ask the public who is responsible for fuelling the culture wars, the response leans heavily towards politics and with 2024 being a mega election year globally, those tensions will be running higher than normal.
In the UK, the fear of backlash over speaking up for women’s rights has increased by...
So, where is the incentive for brands to wade in?
The reward of breaking taboos
Did you know only 8% of ads pre-tested by Ipsos2 in the past three years featured a grey-haired/mature adult in a primary role. Additionally, there is virtually no representation of disability, even though 12% of the UK report having a disability. Master story tellers out there will see this as an opportunity. There is headroom to tell richer, more diverse stories because they defy convention.
Ipsos ad testing data shows that defying category conventions, the way Bodyform did with #bloodnormal, gives advertisers a +21% lift in attention. That’s a significant bump in ad effectiveness with the commercial upside of making your media money go a great deal further.
Breaking social convention can cause emotions to run high, making marketing that tackles taboos is more highly charged. Advertising with a high emotional charge has a strong advantage at driving long term brand equity, not just attention. In a recent study conducted by Ipsos and Google, examining the role of emotion in brand building, the findings from 100 ads tested showed that highly positive residual emotions on YouTube ads have predictive power over long-term brand growth.
Out of 23 specific emotional states tested, indifference is the weakest predictor of long-term brand growth while empathy and surprise which are ‘bridging’ emotions between positive and negative ones are the strongest predictors. Ads with the highest vs. lowest positive charge were +38% more likely to build long-term brand growth for skippable ads and +42% for forced exposures. Moreover, ads with the highest vs. lowest positive charge were +40% more likely to reduce brand price sensitivity.
Long term brand building and reduced-price sensitivity are cornerstones of growth. We only need to look at the long-term brand success of Unilever’s Dove and ‘Dirt is Good’ brands to see how breaking taboos and defying social conventions comes with some risks but, on balance, delivers unparalleled brand strength over a long period.
While there are risks to breaking taboos, telling a more unconventional story gets you noticed and harnessing empathy, surprise and positivity can help grow your brand long-term.
Out of 23 emotions, empathy and surprise are the strongest predictors of long-term brand growth.
The good brands do not operate in isolation of culture. In fact, the best brands operate as hope structures. They show the way forward. They paint a story of progress for audiences at large."
Jules Chalkley
Chief Executive Creative Director, Ogilvy
Telling unconventional stories and getting talked about
If you are actively breaking a taboo, getting people talking about it helps wireframe your campaign for success.
To understand the drivers of social power, Ipsos tested 36 ad campaigns and simultaneously tracked the campaign mentions online using our social listening platform Synthesio.
We looked for the creative responses that best explained what was driving the campaigns to be talked about online and found four areas that improve social power and ladder into talkability.
1
Cultural Impact
Create ads that reflect the world we belong in and the icons around us. Creatives that are less about “selling” and more about “saying” something important.
2
Creative Bravery
Surprise people by delivering genuinely unique and divergent creative.
3
Positive Feelings
Make people feel good about the experience after viewing the ad.
4
Create Controversy
You don’t need to be liked by everyone. If some people hate your ad, it means you’ve stood out from the noise and touched a nerve.
We assume we are leaping straight to activism when breaking taboos. But there are plenty of other ways to break convention including joy, humour, empathy and irreverence.
The above might imply there is always a degree of activism involved in taboo breaking, but there are also plenty of brands that use other means of taking a shot at their category context. Being truer and more respectful of your consumers by delivering marketing with a twist - using joy, humour, deep relevance, or just irreverence - can also work.
To do this, it is worth taking a long look at your specific category to work out what the intrinsics, codes and clichés are. At Ipsos, we work with clients to fuel their creative briefs with category playbooks that help locate the areas that are ripe for subversion or a twist on the ordinary. Some categories like automotive, beer and toothpaste often rely on, and overuse, category conventions to drive persuasion, making space for challengers to step in and disrupt them.
As an example from a different part of the world, this 2015 TV ad from Pathanjali Ayurveda in India tackles the ‘lab coat’ category convention in dental hygiene and says “Would you only believe me if I put on this white lab coat? People in white coats also tell white lies. What you need is the honesty of natural ingredients for your teeth”.
BrewDog, Liquid Death and other brands that saw the opportunity for a fresh take on the category conventions are great case studies for taboo breaking for long term effectiveness.
Let’s look at some concrete cases from the Effie UK case database on breaking taboos as inspiration for different ways to tell rich, complex, subversive stories that drive effective outcomes.
By its very nature, taboo-breaking can be a highly effective way to make your marketing spend go further, because it will drive both interest and (often profound) emotional association."
Xavier Rees
Group CEO, AMV
Case studies
In summary
While the marketing industry has long discussed the cost of dull and insipid advertising as ineffective5, it is good to see the hard data from a robust dataset3 that proves how indifference negatively impacts long-term brand building.
Breaking taboos by its nature is an emotive thing which can spark attention and when done well drives effective results.
Our top tips for getting it right are:
1
Use humour and fun: Bringing some levity to an uncomfortable conversation can help diffuse tension, make space for honest conversations, and drive effectiveness as it’s a powerful tactic for emotional resonance in ads.
2
Challenge people’s thinking: When there are preconceptions to tackle, making people think as well as feel can be highly effective. Think about the job to be done and whether you need to reinforce an idea or disrupt, and choose strong positive or negative emotions to support the storytelling.
3
Leverage empathy and surprise: These two emotions are strong predictors of long-term brand building and act as a ‘bridge’ between positive and negative feelings. So, regardless of whether you are using joy or shock/sadness as a story aid, do it in a way that allows people to step into the shoes of the characters and deliver it in a fresh way.
4
Remember that humanity matters: Finding the deep personal touches sets effective ads apart. Taking the time up front to understand your target audience and their motivations, using research like Ipsos Creative Labs4, helps. Creative development research should be fertiliser for your creative teams, not weedkiller.
5
Be bold and be prepared when taking a strong stand: Our Effie case studies show a range of ways brand have broken taboos, but being bold is a connective thread that runs through them all. The Mayor of London campaign took the strongest stand and faced the most divisive feedback, but did not back down. Splitting an audience is a strategic choice and brands should do it purposefully and prepare their response. Doing so can help extend the campaign’s success and overall lifespan.
Sources
1. Ipsos UK and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London. The share of the British public who say they are scared to speak out and advocate for the equal rights of women because of what might happen to them has doubled from 2017 to 2024, rising from 14% to 29%.
2. Ipsos Creative Spark Ad testing database. Ads are routinely meta-tagged for characters portrayed by gender, seniors, ethnicity, disability and who are LGBTQIA+.
3. Google Creative Works X Ipsos 2023 study: Emotional drivers of Long-term effectiveness of YouTube ads in which 100 ads tested in the US amongst n=15000 people. In the study, we saw that empathy and surprise were the strongest predictive drivers of long-term brand building while indifference was the weakest.
4. Ipsos Creative Labs are immersive quant & qual research experiences, done in as little as a day which bring together marketing, agency and Ipsos teams in a hothouse environment. It allows you to stress test creative routes, concepts, ideas, and whole campaign ecosystems in a collaborate process with the consumer voice in the room.
5. A dull category doesn’t have to mean dull ads: Transforming adversity into a creative opportunity, Ipsos, Hazel Freeman and Samira Brophy April 2018.
Get in touch
Samira Brophy
Senior Director, Ipsos samira.brophy@ipsos.com
Samira is an Ipsos expert on brand and communication work, with 20 years of experience spanning creative and research roles. She leads Ipsos’ earlystage campaign development offer, is a thought leader on ad effectiveness, and works with clients to adopt a misfit mindset and make bolder, highly creative campaigns that audiences value.
