Tired of the doom and gloom in the news cycle? Perhaps a brand can interest you in a romantic distraction.
As romance shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty take social media by storm, as brands like Audible, Neutrogena, Vera Bradley, and even Doritos have rolled out campaigns that are meant to not only appeal to romance fans but also celebrate the genre—all while, potentially, providing some light entertainment.
“The world is on fire for all of us,” Nic Climer, executive creative director of the marketing agency Rapp, said. “So I think the thing we are all trying to do right now, and we’re all trying to attach to, is to feel something real.”
It’s not just a matter of making consumers feel something; brands are aiming to give them something to feel good about in a time where positive feelings can be hard to come by. “The rise of romance in pop culture is about escapism and joy, two things people are craving right now,” Neha Minj, senior marketing director for face care at Neutrogena, told Marketing Brew in an email. “For brands, it is an opportunity to meet consumers where they are and connect through creativity and shared experiences, rather than just transactions.”
Leaning into stories with a romantic bent to them is almost a cheat code to making people feel something, which is why some marketers see the trend as having legs.
“Romance is having its moment,” James Finn, SVP, global head of brand and content marketing at Audible, told Marketing Brew. “There’s highly, highly engaged conversations [and] brands are seeing that, and with streaming content, movies, and TV shows, it’s a category that continues to grow.”
Revving up readers
Part of brands’ interest in the trend can be chalked up to changing cultural sentiment around the genre. “I feel like in North America, romance has been looked down on for so long, especially the last 20 years of media and culture,” Megha Parikh, executive strategy director at VML, said. “I think that [the] tide is turning. If you look at what people are buying in terms of books and the stories that they’re watching and TikTok and things, it’s okay to have just pure romance and enjoy that for the sake of that romance.”
For a brand like Audible, tracking what’s trending for readers comes with the territory of promoting and selling audiobooks, and while the company focuses on various genres each quarter, the company has found that romance is one of the “most engaged genres on the service, outpacing every other one significantly,” Finn noted. “And [the] audience is a really passionate audience.” (That fervor mirrors traditional book sales, where sales of romance, long a powerhouse genre, are on the rise.)
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Audible aims to reflect that passion in its campaigns with efforts celebrating the genre. Last Friday, as part of its romance marketing efforts, Audible hosted a “Romance Rowboat Experience” in Central Park.
“We’re bringing fans, and we’re having actors there, and basically re-creating that whole concept of audio storytelling with rowboats kind of lean[ing] into different types of romance genres,” Finn said.
Meanwhile, Neutrogena’s entry into the romance marketing trend has also aimed to recognize the passion of the genre’s fans. Last month, the brand partnered with influencer Serena Kerrigan on two “steamy” short stories that are available on Wattpad, a site known for fan fiction, as a way to target millennials and zillennials on BookTok.
Attention seekers
Brands have been going beyond romance to stories of lust and desire. In addition to Neutrogena, Doritos recently featured actor Walton Goggins in a spot that used the tagline “spicy but not too spicy” as part of a throwback parody more akin to a late-night Skinemax movie than traditional romance.
Pushing into different niches is a way for brands to not only test the boundaries of what stories brands can tell but also look to stand out in a fragmented media landscape.
“I think actually [it’s] not so much that they’re willing to test the boundaries, but more that they are desperate enough to [do so to] win attention,” Parikh said. “If you look at the Doritos, the reason it’s wild and smutty is that it’s wild and smutty for a brand, but it’s not wild and smutty for TikTok.”
Even if brand marketers are more willing to roll with more risqué content, it all comes down to making those consumer connections.
“If you think about how brands are trying to evolve and how they’re trying to connect, I think what we’re trying to do as marketers is be more layered and more nuanced,” Climer said. “Romance is a part of that.”