Measure of Pleasure

Background

Newcomer brand Beyond Dark wanted a bigger bite of the UK’s dark chocolate market. The strategy was to try to make their little drops famous for ‘pleasure’.

While many brands try to ‘own’ emotions, few manage to do so believably. The challenge was to be both newsworthy and plausible, on a tight budget.

Idea

The idea was to create the first-ever scale for measuring pleasure. This would give Beyond Dark the tools to prove their credentials for creating pleasure by measuring other lovely moments in life and other brands of chocolate versus their own chocolate drops.

To be newsworthy, the pleasure scale would need to be both credible and entertaining. So a team of neuroscientists set about studying 100 test participants, who were fitted up with ‘EEG’ brainwave-reading headsets.

They were tested blowing bubbles, stroking kittens, listening to beautiful music and their responses measured and analysed.

The documentary and news of the experiment’s findings were released on ‘Blue Monday’, officially the most depressing day of the year. The findings provided the material for the advertising, from outdoor to the pack itself. For once, a brand’s emotional claims had been proven. 

Results

The story got foodies, scientists and the advertising world talking, resulting in an immediate sales uplift of 50% on the day the news was released.

Beyond Dark was propelled from page 22 on Google to the top of UK search rankings for ‘dark chocolate’. The atten- tion persuaded several retailers to stock Beyond Dark while Sainsbury’s, one of the UK’s biggest supermarkets, doubled distribution and took on new flavours. After two months, Beyond Dark sales were up 327% and sales have been continuing to climb.

Our Thoughts

One of the points of conflict in the creative process is the way people think about ideas. Most people deal in abstracts. Pleasure, for instance, is an abstract concept.

My idea of pleasure and yours will not be the same.

What that means is that when I get an abstract proposition such as ‘There is no greater pleasure than After Dark chocolate’ I can only interpret it through personal experience. I will write an ad about experiences which have given me pleasure and you will be appalled.

Creative people deal in concrete ideas. And what is utterly brilliant about this is how Nester and Jenks have turned the imprecision of ‘pleasurable’ into an idea about measurable units. They have brought the methodology of the science lab into the creative department.

Left-brain thinking is logical and mathematical, right-brain thinking is holistic and creative. This is whole-brain thinking at its best.