Rescuing Tango from a Sticky Situation

IPA Effectiveness Awards Case Study 2020

Tango was struggling behind its rival Fanta, which dominated the category. Fanta's relaunch precipitated rapid delisting of Tango, which had to relaunch to survive. Parent company Britvic invested £0.75m in media for one year, making future backing conditional on proven success. Tango needed greater distinctiveness to justify its category role. Tango developed a new brand platform, rooted in the insight that 16-24s often suffer excruciating awkwardness, and lack the skills to style it out. This led to disruptive brand-building communications, attracting 1.4million extra households, stealing share from Fanta, and growing brand value by £11.6m year to March 2020.

At the start of this campaign, Tango stood at a crossroads; the simple option was to consign Tango to the history books, but instead we took the riskier path: to invest in an audacious turnaround plan. This is a remarkable tale of how Tango’s advertising rescued the brand from the edge of extinction, and restored it to its former glory. The biggest lesson we learnt on our advertising journey is that when you operate in a large, busy category with many established brands (that you can’t out-spend), the need to be brave and bold is critically important. Firstly, this bravery manifested itself in refusing to be a follower and adopting the same category norms as everyone else. The need to be different and cut through the noise was one of the principle ingredients for success – contributing to Tango’s extraordinary value growth of +38% YoY. Secondly, having a communications idea which is routed in solid consumer insight ensures your campaign will go beyond simply being entertaining and have a cultural relevance (which is crucial when speaking to younger audiences). Teens actually ended up telling us that “Tango is a brand that understands [them]” – a phenomenal result for a notoriously tricky audience. As a result, we have now invested in up-front strategic research for several campaigns for other Britvic brands. Thirdly, ensuring that the brand turns up in the right way and at the right moments for the audience ensured that we drove quality mental availability, and we are now looking at how this ‘cherry picked’ approach may help other brands. Internally, the campaign has built huge belief in the Tango brand and its future potential – transforming Tango from a brand on a declining path, to one that sets an example of what can be achieved with the right approach.

James Lomax, Brand Manager
Britvic PLC