Very few brands have slogans that cut through like that of Specsavers. The optical retailer’s historically humorous approach also makes it one of the brands that can pop up during cultural moments on social media without seeming to be inserting itself into the conversation.
So, what is it like to do this work for the optician and audiologist brand? We caught up with Lisa Hale, Head of Consumer PR and Social Media, to find out about her day-to-day. She tells us about brand consideration frameworks, the premium on attention, the beauty of Guernsey, and her favourite TikToker.
Lisa Hale: I am lucky to have a great work-life balance. I work mostly from home, so (usually!) I’m up at 7am, and head out for jog with my dog Bea. My partner Daniel and I live in a beautiful part of the world – the Wye Valley – where Sex Education was filmed! So, getting out in the mornings and straight into nature wakes me up and sets me up for the day. Then it’s a strong pot of coffee (or three!) and I jump online.
Specsavers is such a complex business, with so many work streams, that no one day is the same as the next. The second I get my head down, the day flies by. However, constantly working from home can get a bit isolating from time to time. I get inspiration and energy from being around people, in person, so I’ll head over to our head office in Guernsey every few weeks or so, which is such a treat. It’s a beautiful island, with excellent restaurants and beaches.
In terms of keeping our finger on the pulse, we hold Editorial Board sessions twice a week
Or I’ll impose on one of our agencies, be that Freshwater in Cardiff, near where I live, Tangerine in Manchester or Golin in London. Overall, I feel truly grateful for the set up I have. I get to work with an incredible family-owned brand, great colleagues and super talented agencies. I’m also my dad’s main carer following his stroke a few years ago, and Specsavers has enabled me to work flexibly to accommodate his needs, which helps so much.
I don’t tend to dwell on either success or failure. But I would say you learn more from failures, so personally I’m not scared of failure and I encourage my team to fail – just do it quickly, dust yourself off, learn and crack on. Success is great but if you rest on your laurels you’ll be overtaken.
My favourite (albeit non-scientific) measure is my friends and family talking about my work or sharing it (without me bribing them!). From a personal satisfaction perspective, I love seeing my team’s pride following any sort of win on the work they do.
We work against a brand consideration framework – which give us our content pillars. How we activate in PR and social channels depend (mainly) on our audiences – what do they want to hear, what’s trending, what’s being discussed in culture, what expert advice are people searching for? With many of our upper and mid-funnel outputs, we’re led by our audiences – not just what WE want to tell them. If we let that happen, we’d fade into the noise.
We make sure our social and PR agencies are fully inducted and live and breathe the Specsavers brand. We have brand guidelines which we’ve adapted for social and PR, in collaboration with our global brand team and in-house creative team. We also all understand the purpose we’re working towards and how we show up. In terms of keeping our finger on the pulse, we hold Editorial Board sessions twice a week where we not only align but look at culture and trends and react and adapt across our channels accordingly.
Attention. The fact a PR campaign won big for the first time ever at Cannes Lions is a nod towards how the industry is shifting in this direction. I believe in brand consistency, executed over a prolonged period – but HOW brands execute needs to evolve. And in today’s saturated digital world, with ad blockers on the rise, waning attention on content and audiences becoming more and more fluent at natively filtering ads they don’t deem relevant, doing what we’ve always done just isn’t getting the same cut through.
With many of our upper and mid-funnel outputs, we’re led by our audiences – not just what WE want to tell them.
Brands need to think about how they stand out – adopting a more ‘publisher’ style or entertainer mindset, add value to people’s experiences, rather than distract or annoy. We also need to understand measurement better. What do impressions actually mean today? Is what we’re buying as good as we think it is? Is that ad you’ve seen 10 million times during your Married at First Sight binge watch really going to do anything for long term brand favourability? We’re currently working on a new consideration measurement tool that will dig into this more for our brand.
It’s been a busy five years. In 2019 Specsavers social media was a dumping ground for campaigns from across the business – there was no strategy, coherence or consistent tone of voice and it was being used as an advertising platform only. The challenge was clear, and best of all, Spescsavers in-house creative agency had built an incredible brand to work with, which I’d always admired. It was a dream brief!
The first job was to carve out a strategic role for the channel within the business. This included creating guardrails which meant all messaging aligned to the marketing objective and activating mini ‘peacock’ projects, like the social activation of The Ashes, to demonstrate to leadership the potential effectiveness of social media to secure further investment. This resulted in the appointment of our retained agency, Tangerine.
Then, March ’21 lockdown hit. As a business we stayed open for urgent care. Almost all our trading-focused advertising was paused and social and PR became a key channel to communicate to consumers why our 1,000 stores were staying ‘Open For Care’. The positive side to this was it once again put a spotlight on how effective the channel can be – scooping Best Healthcare Campaign during COVID at the PR Week Awards.
Post pandemic, we turned our attention back to the quality and effectiveness of our outputs and how it could align better with PR. My focus went on setting up a Consumer team, merging the PR and the Social team to create more aligned outputs and business results. The change also included the appointment of Golin. Over the past 12 months they’ve worked jointly with Tangerine and the newly formed Consumer team to develop the most effective earned-led campaigns we’ve ever done as a brand, including ‘Best Worst Team’ and hearing-loss campaign Misheard Lyrics, which won big at Cannes Lions this year.
There’s a comedian called Laura Ramoso and her Tiktok impressions of her German mum are more like my German mum than my actual German Mum. It makes me belly laugh because it’s so relatable (to me!)