Hearts & Science – Buscopan (Sanofi)
Buscopan is the UK’s leading irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) brand, a condition that affects one in 10 people with a wide range of symptoms, including bloating and stomach cramps. However, IBS awareness remains low. As a category leader, Buscopan wanted to get people talking about IBS, to improve awareness and expand the category. However, this challenge would require a radically different strategy to drive high cultural impact with a small budget.
Trust is a key driver of choice in the healthcare category. Buscopan also identified that context is a key multiplier on effectiveness by up to 2.5 times. News brands offered the perfect combination of trust and context.
Talking to IBS sufferers, Buscopan uncovered a surprising insight: the problems that IBS sufferers have finding comfortable clothing that is stylish and fashionable. This tension gave Buscopan a narrative platform and an opportunity to behave less like a pharmaceutical brand and more like a fashion label.
The plan focused on three pillars: launching during a big fashion moment, looking like high fashion and appearing only in high fashion contexts. With this in mind, London Fashion Week was the obvious launch moment. Buscopan created a series of editorial-style fashion spreads, showing models clutching their stomachs in catwalk-style poses and features copy about IBS in the style of fashion editorial.
With readers being 55% more likely than average to have suffered from IBS bloating, ES Magazine became the cornerstone of the media plan; with its long copy and high attention format, print was the perfect contextual environment to execute the creative.
The campaign also featured a single-page ad and a double page spread running consecutively in its London Fashion Week roundup. This was supported by creative in other fashion and lifestyle magazines, together with highly targeted paid social using a geo-targeting overlay of the hub of London Fashion Week, Somerset House.
Buscopan’s high fashion approach to IBS took killer consumer insight not only to push the brand into a new context with highly original creative, but also challenged what the category’s creative conventions could be.
With minimal investment, the campaign made the brand more meaningful in people’s lives, delivering over six million impacts. This helped Buscopan strike a chord with IBS sufferers everywhere, with over two million conversations online stemming from the campaign.
6m
impacts delivered
2m
online conversations started
