If you haven’t already heard the buzz about the new Johnson & Johnson ad campaign, you will. And after May 10, it will find its way to a page or screen near you. Thirty million bucks buys a lot of exposure.
What caught our attention is the emotive premise of the campaign, which is called “For All You Love.” With a name like that, you can guess it’s going straight for your heartstrings. The teaser image on the J&J home page suggests we’ll see lots of loving parents applying Band-Aids® and baby soap.
This is not just because the company wants to play off how much we love our kids. It’s going through a rough patch, including expensive product recalls and lawsuits. J&J must be hoping that the power of love can make customers and investors forget about the bad stuff and put their trust in the company again.
The good news is that emotive branding can work this kind of wonder, if there’s a brand promise and a set of authentic associations.
Unfortunately, it’s not clear that J&J is bringing complete authenticity this time.
Officially, Johnson & Johnson operates according to a short statement by a member of the founding family, Robert Wood Johnson, who was chairman of the board for more than 30 years, beginning in 1932. (You may have heard of his namesake charitable foundation, one of the better ones out there.)
A dozen years into his seat at the pinnacle of the company, Johnson penned a “credo” (Latin for “I believe”) that J&J now calls its “credo values.”
One of the most striking things about this text is how straightforward it is: short sentences, simple statements, and a powerful absence of adjectives. The first sentence of each of the four paragraphs uses the word “responsible” or “responsibility” – decades before those words became common corporate stock.
And there, in the fourth sentence of the fourth paragraph, is the statement that “mistakes [must be] paid for.”
You could interpret this to mean that the company will pay up for any legal damages it can’t escape some other way. But if you read the “credo” firsthand, you get the distinct impression that Robert Wood Johnson didn’t see it that way. He meant that if J&J screwed up, it would not pretend otherwise. It would pay the piper.
This time, the company is paying for a global ad campaign about love.
We like the courage to go emotive, but we will be looking for some messages for the head as well as the heart. If the campaign is just sentimental music and images, aimed at manipulating a moment, J&J might be better off spending $30 million some other way.
