Classic Characters Make Barbour Best in Class

Barbour are a British family firm who make warm outdoor clothing, traditionally for the upper classes but these days appealing to a younger, more urban customer too. They’re a well known local brand but you wouldn’t usually say they’re competing with the likes of Nike and Adidas. Except this Christmas, they’re not just competing with those brands, they’re beating them. Barbour have made the top scoring ad on the Test Your Ad database in our entire Sports, Performance and Leisure category. How on earth have they managed it?

The secret is Hired Devices – where a brand uses an existing, well-loved character or performer where they might otherwise use a recurring character of their own. Barbour have a long-standing strategy of doing exactly this, taking beloved British animated characters and casting them in stories in which Barbour’s coats and jackets play a starring role. In previous years the brand has borrowed Raymond Briggs’ Father Christmas, the iconic bear Paddington, and Aardman Animations’ Wallace And Gromit, all of them in new, Barbour-centric adventures.

This year it’s the turn of another Aardman character, Shaun The Sheep and his supporting cast including sheepdog Bitzer. Bitzer is leading a choir of sheep in rehearsals for a secret carol concert, but his plans are in jeopardy as it’s simply too cold for the sheep to bleat the tune out properly. A quick trip to the Barbour shop and the singing sheep are kitted out in warm jackets so the carol concert is back on. It’s a simple story made livelier by a lot of lovely comedy moments, like a sheep’s glass of water freezing into ice and falling on its foot, or the animals having to disguise their singing as the farmer walks past.

Hired Devices are a double-edged strategy for brands. They can work wonders for an ad’s emotional impact and entertainment value, as audiences’ interest and expectations rise on seeing familiar faces. But they can also distract from the brand, especially a small or niche brand like Barbour. Barbour gets round this by making sure its products take a prominent role in every ad, and this year it’s landed a good Brand Fluency score of 83%, absolutely in line with the performance you’d expect from a brand its size.

Where Barbour really excels, though, is in the attention to detail it brings to each ad. It never sacrifices entertainment for sales pitching, and it borrows the animation style and voice actors as well as the characters themselves. Viewers are left in no doubt this is the “real” Shaun and Bitzer they’re seeing, with a comic adventure which might as well be an outtake from the films. At System1 we talk a lot about the benefits of cultural references and Barbour give us a masterclass each year, with wonderful craft and attention to detail, but a story that still makes sense and entertains even if you’ve never heard of Shaun.

This year’s ad is Barbour’s most effective yet, with a 5.6-Star score putting it ahead of any other sports and leisurewear ad we’ve tested. Part of the secret is that, even though the characters the brand uses change every few years, there’s an underlying creative consistency to the idea that goes back a decade now. A beloved and very British brand is making its mark at Christmas with beloved and very British characters. Barbour doesn’t have to draw attention to its brand values of tradition and Britishness when they’re obvious in every animated line of its Christmas ads.

Hungry for more festive insights? For a comprehensive look at the 2024 holiday ads, download our “12 Gifts of Christmas” report.

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