Interbrand: Let’s Talk About Talking About Sex
Normal, a sexual wellness brand, first appeared on Interbrand’s radar when we compiled our 2021 Breakthrough Brands Report (an overview of AU+NZ’s most interesting and successful challenger brands).
Normal speaks to and with its customers about sex all the time. That’s no mean feat because sex is a complex, broad, emotionally charged topic. Euphemisms abound, people’s experiences differ vastly, and a lack of understanding can get in the way of open conversations.
In Interbrand's chat with Lucy Wark, Normal’s founder, she explains how the brand’s verbal identity took shape and the intricacies of striking a playful yet thoughtful tonal balance.
Interbrand> Were you set on the name Normal from the outset?
Lucy> There was a list of, I think it was probably a few hundred potential names, sourced from a bunch of people around the company. We whittled those down, matched some with the visual identity, explored what taglines might go with them, and thought about how the names would evolve. We eventually got it down to one; Holiday. It was the one that none of us hated, but no one really loved.
The next day we restarted the process, and I said to the team, "I'm sorry, but Holiday doesn't feel right."
Interbrand> Why didn’t it feel right?
Lucy> People bring really strong positive and negative associations to sex. It touches on intense human desire and questions of identity and play.
But also, and this is quite close to my heart, it can also involve experiences of sexual dysfunction and pain. So the thing that felt wrong about calling a brand Holiday was that it silences or erases those experiences, and we had this sense of wanting the brand to be bigger than just a thing that sells vibrators, (even though we love vibes). Holiday was failing to speak to that.
We restarted the process, and when we heard the name Normal, we were like, “That's perfect.” I think everyone in the room felt really good about it, particularly once we thought through how it enables us to be cheeky, because we're trying to normalise a different conversation about sex, and at the same time explore a deeper set of themes.
Interbrand> How do you feel about the decision now?
Lucy> Normal breaks through the kind of hushed tones and euphemisms people can experience in the space.
The amount of feedback we've gotten along the lines of, “I love the name. I love what it's saying,” makes me think it was probably the right thing. We want to help people go from feeling alone or abnormal to feeling like they’re experiencing things that lots of people go through and feeling validated and seen in those experiences.
Interbrand> Why do you use human names for your products?
Lucy> This was one of those decisions that looks good in retrospect but was probably taken very lightly and hurriedly. I came up with a few different schemas. One was onomatopoeic — the product names sounded like the thing you should feel while using it. Another direction was naming them after icons in the history of sex education and sex research, like Masters and Johnson.
Inclusion is a very big part of what we want this brand to stand for, so we don't assume our users are heterosexual or cisgendered. I started reviewing unisex baby names lists.
I showed that approach to the team and no one had any feedback, so I was like, “Well, fuck it. We're doing the unisex human names.” At the time I thought, “Hey, it feels cheeky, and it also speaks to another value [inclusion].” Plus, human names are just friendlier.
Interbrand> How do you know when a product is a Quinn and not a Flynn?
Lucy> We try to match the name with the personality and visual and use case.
We have a very small, kind of squishy one that's a palm vibrator. It's very beginner- friendly. That’s named Billie. We have a couple more advanced, more internal toys that explore more sensations. Those have slightly more elevated-sounding names, like Piper and Darcy.
Interbrand> How did you approach finding your personality, and then applying that to your tone of voice?
Lucy> We built a Minimum Viable Brand document, which had ‘What's the persona of this brand?’ in it. And it was: A cool older sibling with a sexology degree. We included a lot of ‘They speak like this, not this’ examples:
- They use humour, but not in a way that's designed to make a specific group the butt of the joke. It's inclusive humour that brings people into the conversation.
- They can be funny, but they don't make fun of topics that are serious.
- They speak from expertise, but not in a way that makes people feel small. It's in a way that makes people feel empowered.
- And they speak directly about sex. They don’t use euphemisms or try to slide past the fact they sell vibrators.
A bunch of things like that, which kind of capture the tone that we wanted. What's been interesting has been how little the voice has changed from the initial thinking that we did.
Interbrand> You touched on your approach to humour then. Overall, Normal a playful brand. But there are instances when playfulness needs to take a back seat. How do you navigate that?
Lucy> Having a very clear sense of what's not funny and what we don't make jokes about is really important. We actually have a cultural document that's essentially Red Zone, Orange Zone, Green Zone, in terms of what we say to each other internally. We have a similar version for the brand itself that basically says, “Look, certain topics are not ever funny. They're very important.”
An example where those guardrails are quite helpful is the majority of our audience being female-identifying. It’s very tempting for a lot of brands to lean very hard into humour that appeals to women in spaces where they're talking to each other. And that humour can sometimes end up being about the many shortcomings of modern masculinity or the shortcomings of men.
One thing that we've always wanted to steer really clear of is humour that involves targeting one group to make another laugh because we wanted to build the brand— even if we have an audience that ends up skewing one direction or the other. Anyone should be able to come in and feel that they're welcome here.
Interbrand> Looking around the category, has the way brands talk about sex and sexuality changed much since you founded Normal in 2020?
Lucy> I'd say the broad trend is being much more inclusive in the way that you speak. Being more relaxed about discussions of pleasure. A lot of the ways that brands have historically spoken about sex have been very binary. There’s your clinical, medicalised, safety-focused, anaesthetised voice. And then you've got brands that leant into vice, speaking to the adult and the erotic… but in a way that felt very shame-laden. The shame was part of the kick, though.
People’s sexual and erotic and romantic lives are much more nuanced and complex.
