Littlewoods and the Repositioning of Myleene Klass

A few days ago we reported on the launch of Littlewoods's Christmas TV advertising, as well as the detailed on-the-ground campaign that was planned to back it up.  Core to the campaign was the figure of Myleene Klass.  While competitors such as Marks & Spencer and John Lewis had in previous years invested heavily in celebrities for their Christmas campaigns, the trend in 2014 has been to save money and focus on developing the brand narrative.  Apart from Littlewoods, the only major retailers to use celebrities this year have been Morrisons (with Ant and Dec) and Iceland (with Peter Andre).

Myleene Klass's Twitter picture: a brand repositioning?

Using celebrities has always been popular with brands as they raise the profile and gain you popular recognition.  In the digital environment, too, the celebrity's fanbase on Twitter and FaceBook is usually far larger than the retailer's, and we can see Peter Andre in particular working this resource effectively for the benefit of his employer.

Littlewoods this week have seen a massive boost to their visibility through the involvement of Myleene Klass, but probably for the wrong reasons.  The controversy started on 17 November when she appeared in a TV debate with politician Ed Miliband, the leader of Britain's Labour party.  Klass energetically laid into Labour's plans for a so-called Mansion Tax.
 
Over the following days, much of the popular press focused on Milliband's discomfort - and so the controversy did not undermine the Littlewoods brand.  But Labour then produced a response almost tailor-made for the social media age: Milliband's PRs used the phrase "pure and simple" - a direct reference to the 2001 pop single from a made-for-TV band called Hear'Say, featuring a then unknown Myleene Klass.  The original tweet announcing this, at the time of writing, has been re-tweeted 900 times and has been favourited 444 times.

Almost immediately, online and in the mainstream media Myleene Klass became a target of derision.  The Daily Telegraph called her "a deadly force of nature":  Klass's rhetorical question in the original TV debate "have you seen what [£2 million] can get you? It’s like a garage" became a meme in itself, with social media users only too happy to provide answers.  As a result the Klass brand which was originally aligned with popular TV reality shows such as I'm a Celebrity came to be more associated with wealth and privilege.  The so called Mansion Tax that Klass was taking issue with would affect just 1% of the houses in Britain, with their millionnaire residents being unlikely ever to be Littlewoods customers.  Her intervention certainly generated publicity for Klass (and she was not slow to use it to promote a possible Hear'Say comeback).

Klass and Miliband in the original TV debate: picture Daily Mail

The publicity also meant that pre-arranged parta of the Littlewoods Christmas campaign got far more publicity than they might have done prior to the media storm.  Obligingly, the Daily Mail's "exclusive" on 19 November never even mentioned Mansion Tax.  While this may have been a damage limitation exercise by Klass and Littlewoods, it had little effect. On the same day an online petition was started to have Klass dropped as the face of Littlewoods citing her “deeply insensitive and ignorant comments”.  This then sparked a counter petition calling for the anti-Klass petition to be withdrawn.

Meme and counter meme: at the time of writing, there are 15 times more people wanting Littlewoods to drop Klass than there are digital voters wanting the 'drop Klass' campaign stopped.  Klass herself is being uncharacteristically quiet on Twitter.  As we noted with John Lewis's Monty the Penguin meme, the popular counter-blast does not necessarily harm the original.  It may be a different matter for Littlewoods.