Advertising: Trying to Burnish Its Image, Johnson & Johnson Turns to Emotions

The company’s McNeil Consumer Healthcare unit recalled more than 280 million packages of over the counter medications like Motrin, children’s Tylenol liquid and Benadryl in 2010, and the same year, its DePuy Orthopedics unit recalled two popular artificial hip replacement models.

About 10,000 lawsuits have been filed involving those artificial hip devices and while a Chicago jury this month rejected claims of wrongdoing by Johnson & Johnson in one suit, another lawsuit in March yielded a less favorable outcome when a Los Angeles jury ordered the company to pay more than $8.3 million in damages to a Montana man.

In the midst of that turmoil — and perhaps to distance itself from the bad press of product recalls and pending litigation — the company on Thursday is introducing its first corporate branding campaign in more than 10 years. The company will announce the campaign, called For All You Love, at its annual shareholder meeting in New Brunswick, N.J.

The cornerstone of the campaign, a 60-second black and white video, begins with a shot of a sleeping baby about to get a gentle kiss from its mother. In the background, a softer, almost childlike version of the Guns N’ Roses song, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” plays.

“Love,” says a woman’s voice. “It’s the most powerful thing on the planet.” Happy clips from everyday life — a father bathing with his baby, a grandfather playing piano with his granddaughter and a teacher playing with her students — are seen during the spot, as is the occasional Johnson & Johnson product like Band-Aids and baby shampoo.

“Love is family,” says the voice-over. “Love is the reason you care for the tiny and the fragile.”

The campaign was created by TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of TBWA Worldwide, a division of the Omnicom Group. It is the first time the agency has worked with Johnson & Johnson.

“This is the chance to reassert this very iconic brand to the world,” said Rob Schwartz, the global creative president of TBWA Worldwide. The creative team at the agency was inspired by a company statement produced in 1943 that highlighted its responsibility to its consumers, employees, communities and stockholders. Mr. Schwartz described the statement as “one of the best corporate documents ever.”

Based on that, the agency created a manifesto about love that will appear in print publications, including The New York Times and People magazine on May 10. Television commercials and digital ads will begin appearing on May 6 during shows like “Modern Family” on ABC, “The Voice” on NBC and “American Idol” on Fox, and on Web sites like abcnews.com. The videos feature real people and real relationships, not actors, Mr. Schwartz said. Subsequent videos for the campaign will also focus on the philanthropic work the company supports. The campaign is estimated to cost $20 million to $30 million through the end of the year.

While a Johnson & Johnson spokeswoman declined to comment on the company’s recalls or the lawsuits it faces, Michael Sneed, the company’s vice president for global corporate affairs, said the goal of the campaign was “to continue to reconnect with all of the people who come into contact with J.& J. in their daily lives.”

A campaign focused on love creates a sense of trust with the brand, said Kapil Bawa, a marketing professor at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. “Corporate branding tries to instill a sense of trust in the company and for J.& J., given the kind of products it makes, that trust is very, very critical,” Mr. Bawa said.

Mr. Sneed agreed. “I do think people want to understand what’s behind the brand,” he said. “They want to understand what they value.”

Many brand campaigns of late have included a major emotional hook, including a Procter & Gamble campaign from last summer’s Olympics about mothers and their athlete children and a Dove campaign about a forensic sketch artist drawing women based on their own descriptions. “They are trying to humanize the corporate entity,” Mr. Bawa said. “That’s why emotion is so important.”

Emotion was also present at the ad agency table, Mr. Schwartz said. “The smell of the baby powder, the scent of the shampoo, everybody got very emotional just from our meetings,” he said. “This is a very emotional brand, so we’ve got to deliver a very emotional idea.”

Advertising: Trying to Burnish Its Image, Johnson & Johnson Turns to Emotions

The company’s McNeil Consumer Healthcare unit recalled more than 280 million packages of over the counter medications like Motrin, children’s Tylenol liquid and Benadryl in 2010, and the same year, its DePuy Orthopedics unit recalled two popular artificial hip replacement models.

About 10,000 lawsuits have been filed involving those artificial hip devices and while a Chicago jury this month rejected claims of wrongdoing by Johnson & Johnson in one suit, another lawsuit in March yielded a less favorable outcome when a Los Angeles jury ordered the company to pay more than $8.3 million in damages to a Montana man.

In the midst of that turmoil — and perhaps to distance itself from the bad press of product recalls and pending litigation — the company on Thursday is introducing its first corporate branding campaign in more than 10 years. The company will announce the campaign, called For All You Love, at its annual shareholder meeting in New Brunswick, N.J.

The cornerstone of the campaign, a 60-second black and white video, begins with a shot of a sleeping baby about to get a gentle kiss from its mother. In the background, a softer, almost childlike version of the Guns N’ Roses song, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” plays.

“Love,” says a woman’s voice. “It’s the most powerful thing on the planet.” Happy clips from everyday life — a father bathing with his baby, a grandfather playing piano with his granddaughter and a teacher playing with her students — are seen during the spot, as is the occasional Johnson & Johnson product like Band-Aids and baby shampoo.

“Love is family,” says the voice-over. “Love is the reason you care for the tiny and the fragile.”

The campaign was created by TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of TBWA Worldwide, a division of the Omnicom Group. It is the first time the agency has worked with Johnson & Johnson.

“This is the chance to reassert this very iconic brand to the world,” said Rob Schwartz, the global creative president of TBWA Worldwide. The creative team at the agency was inspired by a company statement produced in 1943 that highlighted its responsibility to its consumers, employees, communities and stockholders. Mr. Schwartz described the statement as “one of the best corporate documents ever.”

Based on that, the agency created a manifesto about love that will appear in print publications, including The New York Times and People magazine on May 10. Television commercials and digital ads will begin appearing on May 6 during shows like “Modern Family” on ABC, “The Voice” on NBC and “American Idol” on Fox, and on Web sites like abcnews.com. The videos feature real people and real relationships, not actors, Mr. Schwartz said. Subsequent videos for the campaign will also focus on the philanthropic work the company supports. The campaign is estimated to cost $20 million to $30 million through the end of the year.

While a Johnson & Johnson spokeswoman declined to comment on the company’s recalls or the lawsuits it faces, Michael Sneed, the company’s vice president for global corporate affairs, said the goal of the campaign was “to continue to reconnect with all of the people who come into contact with J.& J. in their daily lives.”

A campaign focused on love creates a sense of trust with the brand, said Kapil Bawa, a marketing professor at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. “Corporate branding tries to instill a sense of trust in the company and for J.& J., given the kind of products it makes, that trust is very, very critical,” Mr. Bawa said.

Mr. Sneed agreed. “I do think people want to understand what’s behind the brand,” he said. “They want to understand what they value.”

Many brand campaigns of late have included a major emotional hook, including a Procter & Gamble campaign from last summer’s Olympics about mothers and their athlete children and a Dove campaign about a forensic sketch artist drawing women based on their own descriptions. “They are trying to humanize the corporate entity,” Mr. Bawa said. “That’s why emotion is so important.”

Emotion was also present at the ad agency table, Mr. Schwartz said. “The smell of the baby powder, the scent of the shampoo, everybody got very emotional just from our meetings,” he said. “This is a very emotional brand, so we’ve got to deliver a very emotional idea.”

You're the Boss: A Start-Up Tries to Give Wine Spritzers a New Image and a Second Wind

Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times Jayla Siciliano: “Keeping the product natural makes it much more difficult to find bottlers we can use.”The adventure of new ventures.

During the seven years she did product development and design for both Diesel in Santa Barbara, Calif., and Burton Snowboards in Burlington, Vt., Jayla Siciliano attended a lot of work-related parties and dinners and did plenty of social drinking. The problem was that she also had to get up the next morning and work, so during social events she started pouring sparkling water into her wine. “It was perfect,” she said. “I could sip that all night and I would wake up feeling fine.”

What she had concocted was a wine spritzer, the stuff women drank at summer barbecues in the 1970s and ’80s. The spritzer always had a “girlie” reputation, solidified with the advent of wine coolers in the ’80s, a bottled, sweetened version of the spritzer. The popularity of both spritzers and coolers faded in the ’90s, but in the last year or so the spritzer has been making a comeback. (This newspaper wrote about that comeback last May). Now Ms. Siciliano has become part of its second wind.

She first created her version of the spritzer while at Burton Snowboards, where she spent a lot of time on boats in the summer, conducting business with “big guys that do a lot of snowboarding.” They saw Ms. Siciliano pouring Pellegrino into her wine glass and started asking for some in theirs, too. “I thought if these guys want to drink a spritzer, I could break through the feminine reputation it has,” she said.

She quit her job in 2007, moved back to Santa Barbara and started doing research into things like carbonation, bottling and flavor formulas. She also went back to school and got an M.B.A. at the University of San Diego. While there, she wrote the business plan for her wine spritzer start-up, Bon Affair, and started raising money. Although Ms. Siciliano did conduct focus groups and surveys to collect data on the importance of ingredients, she did no market research before diving in.

Ms. Siciliano did look at trends in the alcohol industry, however, and saw both the growth in light beer over the last 20 years and the growing interest in wine as indicators she was onto something. “I also bartended in college and again in 2009, when I was starting Bon Affair,” she said, “and I saw lots of women looking for a lighter option after that second glass.”

In April 2010, Ms. Siciliano connected with Troy Johnson, a food writer in San Diego and former creator and star of the Food Network show “Crave.” Mr. Johnson said when he heard Ms. Siciliano describe her version of the spritzer — using good wine, no preservatives, no sweeteners — “lights started to go on. I had seen wine spritzers coming back a bit; the best mixologists were starting to play with them on their menus. And when I tasted it, it was so much better than I thought it was going to be. It has a very sophisticated palate.”

Mr. Johnson was traveling for “Crave” last February when Ms. Siciliano called to tell him she had found two angels willing to invest $450,000 in Bon Affair. She asked if he was on board. “I was sitting in a bar in Manhattan and I looked down at the menu and it said ‘wine spritzer,’” Mr. Johnson said. “I told her, ‘I’m in.’”

Founder: Jayla Siciliano.

Employees: Bon Affair has nine partners — all have stock options — but no full-time employees yet.

Location: Solana Beach, Calif.

Pitch: “The reason I got into this was because it fit into a healthy, balanced lifestyle, which is how I want to live,” Ms. Siciliano said. “We have two products, a sauvignon blanc and pinot noir and we don’t add sugar or preservatives. It’s a lighter alternative for wine drinkers, it has half the calories.”

Challenges: The first 5,000 bottles that came off the line last spring at the Detroit manufacturer Ms. Siciliano chose had specks of tomato floating in them. “They had been bottling a Bloody Mary mix and didn’t fully clean the line,” she said. “We had to scrap all of that.”

There were other bottling issues too — leaking, caps that wouldn’t come off, incorrect labels and low-fills. Ms. Siciliano discovered the cap problem right before a big event in San Diego, after which she and Mr. Johnson spent two days sorting through boxes to separate the bad from the good. The company has since switched to a California bottler. “Keeping the product natural makes it much more difficult to find bottlers we can use,” she said.

Traction: In January, after Bon Affair was mentioned in a Shape Magazine “Hot List,” Ms. Siciliano said Web orders went up tenfold: “We went from a few a week to five or six a day.” In fact orders went up so fast there wasn’t enough product to meet the demand. This spring, Bon Affair will be in four Whole Foods stores in San Diego as well as on Amazon. And in April, after the next bottling run, it will be sold in eight states. The company has also had some international sales through Wineflite, a wine-shipping service based in San Francisco.

Revenue: $15,000. The bottles retail for $14.

Financing: Three investors have put in $640,000.

Competition: “We really don’t have any direct competitors,” said Ms. Siciliano. “There are a couple of spritzer companies in Italy, but they are sweeter and have over 7 percent alcohol. We’re at 6.5 percent.”

What’s Next: A year from now Ms. Siciliano wants Bon Affair’s bottles lining the shelves of all the Whole Foods stores in California and offered on Virgin America flights.

What do you think? Is there a market for Bon Affair?

You can follow Eilene Zimmerman on Twitter.