A Wake-up Call From Folgers – Jingles Work

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“My big message to you is: get a jingle and use a jingle”. That’s what Mark Ritson said at Cannes this year, presenting new research from System1 using the Effies Database. It showed that using a jingle boosts both trust and price insensitivity by 81%. In other words, a great jingle will literally make people happier to pay more for your product.

Folgers Coffee has one such great jingle. “The best part of waking up is Folgers’ in your cup” dates from 1984 and has seen over 40 years of effective use. But in their new campaign with PSOne, Folgers are remixing and recontextualising their legendary tune. The idea is to shift the brand away from simply an association with breakfast but to any time you need a wake-up jolt of energy.

To capture this expanded meaning of waking up Folgers have come up with a clever new way of using their jingle. They’ve found half a dozen other songs about waking up, from Evanesence’s 00s rock anthem “Bring Me To Life” to Aretha Franklin’s sweet soul classic “I Say A Little Prayer”. And they’ve blended them smoothly with the Folgers jingle.

The result is a “wake up” track mixing all the songs together, which is also ideally suited to breaking out into shorter ads for social video and digital platforms. The one we’ve put through Test Your Ad starts with the classic jingle before rocking out with “Bring Me To Life” – it’s an energetic, vibrant commercial making terrific use of the existing asset. The visuals put across Folgers’ idea of tapping the wider cultural meaning of waking up – different coffee drinkers getting out of bed, having a coffee break or just dancing around their front room.

For all its buzz-giving properties coffee is a lethargic ad category on Test Your Ad, with very few top-rated commercials and a decidedly uncaffeinated 2.7-Star Rating average. Folgers easily exceeds that, and its very good 3.6-Star Rating for this ad puts it in the top 13% of the coffee sector. It also gets strong, top quartile results for short-term Spike Rating and for rapid-recognition Brand Fluency.

Those excellent results are testament to the power of a strong jingle. “The best part of waking up” is so well established that Folgers can reimagine it, blend in other cultural references, and still emerge with a highly effective ad that will drive sales and brand effects. Consistency pays, and as System1’s Effies research proves, a jingle is one of the best ways to drive that consistency and lock in customers for your brand.