Features
“The word ‘crap’ takes a bit of getting used to”: How to be creative while selling toilet paper
It's hard to strike a balance between creativity and doing genuine good in the world - especially while marketing a product with an offensive word in the title. Who Gives A Crap's creative head, Vanessa Morrish, explains the challenges of building a global toilet roll brand.
As head of creative for toilet paper brand, Who Gives A Crap, Vanessa Morrish has a challenging job, which involves trying to navigate a brand with ‘crap’ in the title, speaking to serious issues like sanitation without being sanctimonious, and market toilet rolls in overseas markets.
Speaking to Mumbrella, she steps through a few of the challenges that come with building a global brand from the bathroom floor up.
How do you approach creativity at Who Gives A Crap when speaking to serious issues such as the sanitation crisis?
The sanitation crisis is obviously a very heavy topic, and one that you need to navigate with a lot of humanness and thought when it comes to creative output.
On the one hand, we want to find interesting ways to educate our customers on something they don’t know much about and also ask them to help and be a part of the solution. But you also don’t want to make them feel guilty, nor do you want to be too light hearted and cracking jokes.
Another aspect to telling our impact story is to think about how we simplify a complex issue and find the human connection within it. We don’t want our customers to become experts on clean water and sanitation, nor do we want to dumb it down to quick stats and sound bites. As with everything, it’s about finding the right balance.
Vanessa Morrish
Something that is extremely important is making sure we’re showing the communities we help in an empowered and positive light. So, instead of showing them within the problem (i.e. lack of toilets, no water, lack of adequate sanitation) we show them within the solution like having toilets and clean water.
With any kind of creative work around impact, you need to put an extra lens on it to make sure you’re balancing values, humanness as well as the brand and creative excellence. For us, the balance is making sure that people are at the heart of our storytelling and creative decision making.
Growing the Who Gives A Crap brand from the ground up, what has been one of the primary challenges, particularly as you transgress markets?
Well, the word ‘crap’ takes a bit of getting used to for some people, and this is in Australia, as well as in other markets like the US and UK (in some markets more than others). But this is okay, because we’re not for everyone and we like to challenge the status quo. Our brand name has also caused problems with media buys and placements in ‘geos’ like the UK, but it’s nothing that can’t be worked around with a bit of creativity and negotiation.
While we try to keep our copy as universal as possible, as we launch new products in markets, we’re having to lean into local vernacular to help the product better resonate in the market. An example of this is around our new product range. We have bin bags, trash bags and garbage bags because there wasn’t one universal name. This causes a little complexity around naming conventions, communications and packaging, and honestly, in places you’d never imagine or could predict, but you just have to work through them as they come up knowing there’s never a perfect solution.
How has the cultural factor of being an Australian business shaped your creative approach?
I think being a brand that started in Australia and that is also profit for purpose, gives you extra motivation as the underdog (especially in the early days) to find creative solutions around things like having no budgets, no one knowing who you are and wanting to be a brand that translates to a global stage. I think culturally, Australians are very serious about their work, but don’t take themselves too seriously. I see that in the Who Gives A Crap brand too, we take our mission seriously, but the brand is fun and about making people feel good.
Tone and personality are so important to the Who Gives A Crap brand identity, how do you build and maintain that presence as you enter new markets and grow?
Everyone at Who Gives A Crap is a guardian of the brand. I’ve never worked anywhere where people have cared about a brand so much. This is extremely helpful when you’re scaling a brand across different markets, because the people who are helping make this happen are always trying to put the brand first.
Because we’ve always gone for the ‘we’re just a bunch of people trying to do good in the world’ vibe, it has been relatively simple to translate our tone of voice across English speaking markets and we try to make sure we’re as global as possible in our language and humour. Of course, there are some words here and there that don’t translate as well, but that’s when we lean on being Australian.
And really, bum jokes are universally funny.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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