What should brands' content strategy be while treading the mental health route

Mental health is a new space for brands to get involved with. As a culture, we have been quite ignorant about mental health issues and the stigmatising of such issues is one of the consequences of this ignorance.

In recent years, celebrities such as Deepika Padukone have spoken openly about their mental health issues, especially depression. And this has opened the way for brands to take up the platform in their content and communication.

As this is a completely new space being explored, the cinematic language of mental health is being created by brands. They are also exploring the right tonality and messaging as well.

We have looked at the content and communication put out by five brands from very different categories - Future Generali Insurance, Cadbury’s Bournvita, Maybelline, Hindustan Zinc and Deepika’s own Live, Love, Laugh Foundation.

In terms of communication objectives, it seems that all brands are aligned and that education for consciousness-raising is the goal to start with.  Since as a culture, we are at the very beginning of the journey, all brand communication on the theme of mental health, irrespective of brand, aims to educate audiences/the public on the topic.

As for cinematic language and visual codes, we find the defining symbols of mental health to be:

1. Light versus Dark: The frames are usually dark-shaded when the protagonist of the ad suffers from a mental health issue and are usually full of light when they are on the path to recovery. Typically, in cinema, light versus dark is used to connote good versus evil. Good is colour coded as white (angels, auras) and evil is colour coded as black. Pure hearts are white and evil monsters are black.

However, in mental health communication, dark vs. light is used to indicate the

journey into darkness, viz the time when the light goes out of the world and the

person feels that they have descended into darkness. People who have experienced

mental health issues often use these expressions of darkness/light to describe their

experience to others who are ‘normal’. And when they come out of the dark tunnel,

they see the light again.

2. The path to recovery: One common element in most of the above ads is that no protagonist of any of the stories has been portrayed as having ‘recovered’ from their mental health issues. No one is fully ‘beating’ their depression or anxiety. By placing the emphasis of the communication on the challenge/issue and not highlighting the outcome, brands are demonstrating sensitivity to the seriousness of the issue. They are not trivialising mental health issues by showing quick recoveries. They seem to be acknowledging that recovery is a work in progress and takes time and hard work. You have to put in the effort to recover.

Let us do a deeper decoding of the ads and branded content from these brands, starting from the not-so-good ones, that get their messaging and story-telling more wrong than right.

Hindustan Zinc’s campaign

 

 

 

 

 

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The ad uses colour coding as the key visual device to portray mental health issues. The colour palette of the ad changes from black and white to colours when the protagonists talk about how they deal with their problems. Some of them talk about their friends. Suddenly, the veil of sadness is lifted and replaced by colours.

The ad’s message is that the gloom is lifted when people focus on the more positive aspects of life, like their friends and family.

The binary of mental health issues, as portrayed by Hindustan Zinc, showcases that a person either has mental health issues or not. There is no continuum of mental health problems. There are no degrees of severity of the said mental health issues that the ad talks about. It’s either you have a problem, or you don’t. This is a problematic representation, more tuned to the past ideas of our culture about mental health.

Future Generali’s Vase campaign

Future Generali’s ad intends to highlight that mental health issues prevail in our society and can affect our personal and professional lives too. Future Generali is there to provide a unique health insurance product with mental health coverage as well.

In spite of the ad being well-intentioned to raise awareness and persuade the consumer to act on resolving their issues through a health insurance scheme, the tonality of the ad feels inappropriate as the ad tries to make light of mental health. Though the intent is not to make fun of mental health issues, adopting a light-hearted tone so as to connect with a larger audience is not a good approach for a topic as serious as mental health.

Although the animation in the ad is good, the ad feels dehumanised. We can only see the consequences of the action on objects (i.e. a vase and a stress ball) in the house and the office rather than people.

We think there was a conscious choice to move away from showing vulnerable people and children in the house, as that could have made the ad more morbid. However, our assertion is that it would have also made the ad more authentic and empathetic, hence, impactful.

Live Love Laugh Foundation’s campaign

The Live Love Laugh Foundation’s campaign focuses on spreading awareness about mental health on the occasion of World Mental Health Day 2022. In this ad, we see Deepika Padukone (who is also the owner of the foundation) visit remote towns and villages and share her experiences with the populace of that place.

In the video, Deepika is trying to bring about community awareness and sensitise caregivers and families of people suffering from mental illnesses. She also tries to suggest that she and the villagers are placed on the same plane as both are sufferers from mental health issues.  She seems to indicate that mental health issues are a leveller and can hit anyone, from the megastars to village residents.

However, her well-intentioned message seems to be a little out of place due to the huge difference in resources that the village folk and Deepika have. Thus, to the audience, the attempt at empathy rings false and not true.  Instead of nodding in agreement, the audience is left wondering how the two can be placed on the same plane. While Deepika has access to humongous resources, the village folk do not, which is the gap that the Live Love Laugh Foundation is trying to bridge.

The video ends on a somewhat realistic note. She acknowledges that even though there has been some positive change in awareness and the communities have evolved, there is still a long way to go.

Bournvita’s ‘The boy who failed’ short film

Bournvita’s short film narrates the story of a resilient mother who teaches her child not to give up when the going gets tough. The boy plays badminton at a competitive level and finds it difficult to recover from his last loss. He goes through a bout of sadness that one could even categorise as mild depression and is unwilling to play badminton again.

In the frames of the ad, we can see the visual depiction of his sadness quite clearly - The light in the frames becomes dimmed when he is bogged down and struggling to redeem himself. But when he finally resolves to play again, his face is basked in the sunlight to indicate that he is out of his gloomy spirit.

The message of the ad is that you have to believe in yourself to push through the demons that harken you back. And with a supportive family, it is easier to achieve that goal.

Maybelline’s Brave Together Campaign

The idea of using a sports star in this campaign is to show that even someone as resilient as and successful as an Olympian Badminton player can have moments where she feels down too. The fact that PV Sindhu is raising her hands along with people to state that she suffers from a mental illness too, is laudable.

The ad features a diverse set of actors, including men to showcase that mental illness can happen to anyone.

The campaign's message is that when people are honest about their emotions and vocalise how they feel, it helps other people feel seen too. When people share their issues publicly or in a community, it makes other people who are suffering through the same issues feel less alone. When people speak up and share honestly, it also takes away the shame and stigma.

In conclusion, better ads/branded content videos try to give a message of hope to those who are troubled by mental health issues by linking commonly experienced issues like depression and performance anxiety with goal focus/achievement and highlighting that even top-performing stars and sportspeople go through such issues.

Action Takeaways: Brand teams seeking to enter the space of mental health via their communication need to undergo a lot of sensitivity training themselves. Ads should not dehumanise in order to widen appeal or present illness in a binary fashion. Showing that big stars go through mental health issues too, helps reduce the stigma and shame and indicates that it is quite ‘normal’ to go through periods and episodes of depression. However, riding on the back of stars to talk about mental health has only limited shelf life and brands would soon need to find newer ways of story-telling that resonate with ordinary people.