OBJECTIVES

Build a stronger connection

Promote Blackmores’ superior brand

quality and heritage, so customers aren’t

swayed by cheaper brands.

Drive brand awareness and consideration

of Caltrate Vitamin D.

TARGET AUDIENCE

Health aware individuals

Women who are determined, seek more

from their mind and body, and are aware of

the positive benefits vitamins and minerals

have on their health.

STRATEGY

The notion of ‘more’

To help position Blackmores as a more

visionary company, the ‘What Women

Want’ campaign was created with the

notion that women want more. MORE

involvement in relevant environments,

MORE engaged conversations, MORE

consistency of messaging.

CAMPAIGN PERIOD: SEPTEMBER 2012 - APRIL 2013

What Women Want

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What Women Want Campaign

01

A special survey was run on Daily Life aiming to discover everything there is to know about women.

What makes the modern Australian woman tick? What motivates her? Makes her happy? Sad? How do Australian women feel about the future?

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT? The survey ran for 4 weeks across desktop and m-site platforms, and attracted 1524 respondents.

Support was provided by ‘What Women Want’ call-outs, promoting survey participation, coupled with Blackmores advertising within Sunday Life throughout the duration of the campaign.

With Sunday Life’s positioning of BODY. MIND. INSPIRATION, together with Daily Life’s strong online presence, both brands provided the perfect vehicles to promote Blackmores’ visionary positioning. The campaign consisted of three elements: a survey, bespoke content and a reader event.

‘What Women Want’ Survey

1HERSA1 A012

balance

1HERSA1 A012

balance80 years young and many to come

At Blackmores we believe in living a balanced life for happiness, health and wellbeing.

For tools, tips and personalised advice visit blackmores.com.au or find us on

WELLBEING12 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 smh.com.au The Sydney Morning Herald

The hormone thatmakes us good or evilPaul Zak calls oxytocin the ‘‘moral molecule’’. He tellsOliver Burkeman how hugging,massage andwatching soppymovies couldmake us better people.

Interactions on Twitterand Facebook seem tolead to oxytocin surges.

Being treateddecently, it turnsout, causes

people’s oxytocinlevels to rise.

It helps usrespond to beingtrusted with justthe right degree ofreciprocal trust.

He recommendsa minimum eighthugs a day. Evensoppy movies seemto work: he has donethe blood tests.

The American academic PaulZak is renowned among hiscolleagues for two things hedoes to people disconcert-ingly soon after meetingthem. The first is hugging:

seeing me approach across the library ofhis club, in midtown Manhattan, hesprings to his feet, ignoring myoutstretched hand, and enfolds me in hisarms. The second is sticking needles intheir arms to draw blood.

I escape our encounter unpunctured,but plenty of people don’t: Zak’s work,which he refers to as ‘‘vampire studies’’,has involved extracting blood from abride and groom on their wedding day;from people who have just had massages,or been dancing; from Quakers, beforeand after their silent worship; and fromtribal warriors in Papua New Guinea asthey prepare for traditional ritu-als.

That all these peoplesubmit so willingly to hisneedle may have some-thing to do with the factthat he is charmpersonified. A square-jawed, 50-year-oldCalifornian with goodhair, a sunny disposi-tion and a media-friendly nickname (‘‘DrLove’’), Zak gives everyimpression of having beenconstructed in a laboratorycharged with creating the idealauthor of a new buzz book – The MoralMolecule.

What drives Zak’s hunger forhuman blood is his interest in thehormone oxytocin, aboutwhich he has become one ofthe world’s most prom-inent experts. Oxytocin,long known as a femalereproductive hormone– it plays a central rolein childbirth andbreastfeeding – emerges from Zak’sresearch as something much more all-embracing: the ‘‘moral molecule’’ behindall human virtue, trust, affection andlove, ‘‘a social glue’’, as he puts it, ‘‘thatkeeps society together’’. The subtitle ofhis book, ‘‘The new science of whatmakes us good or evil’’, gives a sense ofthe scale of his ambition, which involvesnothing less than explaining wholeswaths of philosophical and religiousquestions by reference to a single chem-ical in the bloodstream.

Being treated decently, it turns out,causes people’s oxytocin levels to rise,which in turn prompts them to behavemore decently, while experimentalsubjects given an artificial oxytocin boost– by means of an inhaler – behave moregenerously and trustingly. And it’s notsolely because of its effects on humansthat oxytocin is known as ‘‘the cuddlehormone’’: for example, male meadowvoles, normally roguishly promiscuous intheir interactions with female meadowvoles, become passionately mono-gamous when their oxytocin levels areraised in the lab.

The aforementioned wedding tookplace at a country house in south-westEngland where Zak set up a temporaryresearch station. He took blood samples,before and after the wedding vows fromthe bride and groom, close familymembers and various friends in attend-ance then flew his spoils – 156 test tubespacked in dry ice – to his laboratory atClaremont University, in southern Cali-fornia. There he discovered the results hehad been expecting: the ceremonycaused oxytocin to rise in the guests. Andit did so in spookily subtle ways: the briderecorded the highest increase, followedby close family members, then less clo-sely involved friends, ‘‘in direct propor-tion to the likely intensity of emotionalengagement in the event’’. (Only thegroom bucked the trend: testosteroneinterferes with oxytocin, and histestosterone was surging.) Mapping thewedding’s oxytocin levels gave rise, in

Zak’s vivid phrase, to a human ‘‘solarsystem’’ with the bride as the sun, thehormone finely calibrated to theemotional warmth each guest felt. ‘‘It wasamazing,’’ Zak recalls. ‘‘Just this perfectsense of how oxytocin attunes to theenvironment.’’

The starting point was a persistentmystery in Zak’s original field,economics: time and again in experi-ments people behave more generouslythan traditional economic models

predict they should. A classicdemonstration of this is

known as the TrustGame, in which

pairs of participants communicate witheach other via computer terminals: theynever meet and have no idea who theother person is.

Person A is given £10 ($15) then invitedto send a portion of it electronically toperson B. Person A has a motive for doingso: according to the rules, which bothplayers know about, any money A sendsto B will triple in value, whereupon B willhave the option of sending some of itback as a thank-you. According toconventional notions of rational beha-viour, the game should break downbefore it has begun. Person B, acting sel-fishly, has no reason to give any moneyback – and, knowing this, person Ashouldn’t send any over in the first place.

Yet, in trials of the game, 90 per cent ofA-people send money and 95 per cent ofB-people send some back. Analysis of the

oxytocin in their bloodstreams revealswhat is going on: by sending money toperson B, person A is giving a sign of trust– and being on the receiving end of a signof trust, it emerges, causes oxytocin toincrease, motivating more generousbehaviour in return.

And it is not just receiving money thatcauses people to feel oxytocin’s warmglow: in other studies Zak has conducted,random windfalls don’t cause nearly somuch of it to be released. What counts isbeing trusted: trust in one person triggersoxytocin in the other, which triggers moretrustworthy behaviour, and so on, in avirtuous circle. ‘‘Well, that’s except for the5 per cent of people who are ‘uncondi-tional non-reciprocators’,’’ says Zak,referring to the consistent minority ofpeople who seem immune to this cycle.‘‘What we call them in my lab is‘bastards’.’’

These findings have striking implica-tions for how we think aboutmorality. Economists tend topride themselves on being hard-headed realists: morality mightbe a nice set of ideas about howpeople ought to behave, thisway of thinking goes, buteconomics is the analysis ofhow they really behave, motiv-ated not by stirring ethicalvalues but by the desire forpersonal gain. Perhapsironically, religionstend to share asimilar view: that

moral conduct doesn’t come naturallybut instead needs to be imposed throughfear or the promise of reward. Zak himselfwas raised in a staunch Catholic house-hold: his mother, he likes to say, took himout of Catholic school because it wasn’tstrict enough and ‘‘based her child-rearing on the assumption that unselfish,moral behaviour was impossible withoutthe ever-present threat of punishment,the more terrifying the better’’. Yet thefact that natural selection has given usoxytocin – a mechanism that allows us tobe instinctively trusting and kind –suggests that what most of us think of as‘‘moral’’ is, in fact, part of how we haveevolved to be.

‘‘Human beings are almost the onlyanimals who regularly want to be aroundstrange members of our species,’’ Zaksays. ‘‘ It’s fun. But to be able to do that, wehave to have something in our heads thatsays: ‘Oliver is safe, Bob is not safe.’ Andthat’s oxytocin – this very old, evolution-arily ancient molecule’’ that helps usrespond to being trusted with just theright degree of reciprocal trust inresponse. Zak’s earlier work had estab-lished that trust is a crucial preconditionfor economic prosperity (to conducttransactions, you have to be able to trustothers) but also a result of it (once you’reno longer fighting for basic subsistence,you can afford to trust more). Now, he hadlocated the biological mechanismthrough which this all worked. TheGolden Rule – treat others as you’d like tobe treated – is, Zak writes, ‘‘a lesson thatthe body already knows’’.

From that follows .. . well, everything.‘‘To me, this is the basis for civilisation: abunch of strangers living together,’’ hesays. ‘‘And, once you have civilisation, youcan have specialisation of labour; you canhave surplus; you can have universityprofessors, and priests, because now youcan afford that, and then you get theadvancement of knowledge.’’

This talk of mixing science andmorality prompts suspicion in somequarters: just because something is‘‘natural’’ doesn’t mean it is ‘‘right’’, in an

ethical sense, and efforts to derive codesof moral conduct from science rarely endwell. Moreover, it is unclear what Zakmeans when he says oxytocin, or the lackof it, ‘‘makes’’ us good or evil. This is thesame problem as with news reports aboutscientists discovering the part of thebrain ‘‘responsible for’’ risk-taking, orgreed, or a belief in God: just because youhave found the biological underpinningsof some phenomenon, it does not neces-sarily follow that you have found ‘‘the realcause’’ of it. Still, none of that under-mines the most potent aspect of Zak’swork, which is the pragmatic one. Ifoxytocin is the mechanism through

which moral action takes place, thatholds out the possibility – a cause ofeither optimism or alarm, depending onhow you look at it – that by manipulatingoxytocin we might boost the levels oftrust, generosity and ultimately happi-ness in ourselves and the world at large.

It took Zak two years of wrangling withthe US Food and Drug Administration

and university ethics panels to gainapproval to use oxytocin

inhalers on experimentalsubjects. (In the meantime, he

got around the restriction byexperimenting on himselfunder the watchful eye ofhis wife, a neurologist.) Butwhile the red tape wasconvoluted, the conclu-sions were not: in exercises

such as the Trust Game,oxytocin-loaded participants

displayed much greater levelsof trust and generosity than those

who used inhalers filled with aplacebo.

All of which would seem to raise sometroubling questions: what is to stop cardealers, say, pumping oxytocin intoshowrooms, or politicians using it whencanvassing? (A company called Vero Labsalready markets an oxytocin spray it calls‘‘Liquid Trust’’, aimed both at sales-people and single men on the prowl.) ButZak waves the matter away: it is incred-ibly hard to get enough oxytocin into thebloodstream, which is why he has to gethis subjects to force such large amountsof vapour up their noses; using it covertlywould never work. Sure, oxytocin can bestimulated in subtle ways to serve otherpeople’s agendas, ‘‘but they’re alreadydoing that. Why do you think they havecute puppies in toilet paper commer-cials? To make you feel good.’’

Meanwhile, Zak says, we should allbe doing more to boost oxytocin inbenign ways. He recommends aminimum of eight hugs a day (pets

count, too); massage and even soppymovies seem to work: he has done the

blood tests.Interactions on Twitter and Facebook

seem to lead to oxytocin surges, offeringa powerful retort to the argument thatsocial media is killing real human inter-action: in hormonal terms, it appears,the body processes it as an entirely realkind of interaction.

Ultimately, one imagines, theoxytocin-savvy citizens of Zak’s of utopiawould focus on charity work andcommunity groups, play with their petsand watch romantic comedies. Theywould be touchy-feely and hug eachother all the time – which makes youwonder whether in the modern world theprescriptions of Dr Love might be a bit ofa lost cause.

GuardianNews&Media

In pursuit ofunhappinessSatisfaction and growth are preferable toa fleeting happiness, writesFrankBures.

As you find ways tocope, you becomea new person.

W hen the Dostoevsky subway station opened inMoscow in 2010, there was concern that thegrim scenes from Dostoevsky’s novels, artis-tically depicted on the grey marble walls

(Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov about to murder theold woman with an axe, the troubled protagonist ofDemons holding a gun to his head), were so depressing thatpeople, overwhelmed by the bleakness, would startthrowing themselves onto the tracks.

Fortunately, the feared rash of suicides has not material-ised. This could be because people do not make thosekinds of decisions based on subway art. Or it could bebecause Russians have a different attitude about happi-ness than most Westerners. One recent study shows theytend to have darker, more negative thoughts. They alsoworry less about those feelings and thus experience fewerdepressive symptoms than Americans. Russians mightbrood more, but they don’t dwell that much on theirbrooding. Americans, on the other hand, brood about theirworrying and end up more depressed than the Russians.

It is, perhaps, a simple fact of life in the West: we expectto be happy. The right to pursue happiness is part ofAmerica’s Declaration of Independence, after all. Thefeeling has been heightened by the booming field of‘‘happiness studies’’, which has produced a flow of newsstories and books about what will and will not make ushappy, about the happiest places to live, and about how tostructure our lives so we can be happy almost all the time.

Some important findings have emerged. Too manychoices lead to dissatisfaction. Chronic pain has a morenegative impact than a single accident. We habituatequickly to our acquisitions. A good marriage is worth about$100,000 a year in terms of how happy it makes us.

But this headlong rush towards happiness might backfire.Could our constant worrying about why we are not happy bemaking us more miserable than if we simply accepted someoccasional unhappiness as part of life? In viewing unhappi-ness as a problem to be solved, might we not miss what alittle sadness has to offer us? Are we trading long-termsatisfaction for feeling good now? Buying our present-dayenjoyment at the cost of future meaning?

Children are a case in point. Recently, there has been aspate of news stories stating that having children does notincrease one’s happiness by any objective measure.Indeed, marital satisfaction declines steeply when kids areborn and does not recover until they leave.

Having two young children, I can more or less confirm thisis true. Yet despite all the headaches, sleep deprivation,stained furniture andgeneral crabbiness, fewparents I know regret theirdecision. One study evenfound that mothersbetween 36 to 44 were lesslikely to be depressed thantheir childless peers, evenif, at a given point on agiven day, they might be less happy. Raising kids is not non-stop fun. But eventually (we hope) we’ll be better for it.

This jibes with the conclusions of some earlier research.In the 1980s, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi foundthat people did not report their most satisfying experiencesas relaxing on the beach, or going to parties, or buying thatcar they had always wanted. The happy moments camewhen they were working hard at something, moving towardsome goal they had, being challenged and absorbed andfocused. A more recent investigation from the Journal ofHappiness Studies also found that people who were workinghard to accomplish something felt more stress in themoment but were happier in the long term.

Suffering is no fun and we usually try to avoid it. But it isalso inevitable. Not so long ago, when life was less certainand comfortable, people understood that suffering couldbe an opportunity to rise to a challenge. They were willingto at least try to extract some meaning from it.

When I lived abroad, I went through what’s known asculture shock – a series of mood swings that occur as youlearn to function in another culture.

As you find ways to cope, you become a new person –someone stronger, more capable, more aware. As youstruggle with culture shock, or any of life’s difficulties,something remarkable happens: you grow.

For a while, I did not understand this. I could not fathomwhy I had developed an odd nostalgia for what I rememberedas a hard and unhappy time. But that was precisely the timewhen I stopped being the person Ihad been and startedbecoming the person Iam. Now, when I recallthose unhappy days,I think of them asthe best days ofmy life.

TheRotarian

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02

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Unique Sunday Life covers were designed using Blackmores’ green brand colouring, together with special Editor’s Letters and engaging ‘What I know about..’ editorial pieces. These highlighted personal experiences, views and opinions of the opposite sex, by Ben Folds, Marjorie Bligh, Nick Earls and John Taylor.

Sunday Life Covers and Editorial

To continue engagement, a new wellbeing page was created specifically for Blackmores within The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Inspired by the ‘What Women Want’ campaign, this regular column discussed relevant topics covering the body, mind and soul.

Wellbeing Section

04‘What Women Want’ Sunday Life - Special Edition

The results of the ‘What Women Want’ survey were published in a special Sunday Life edition on Nov 18th 2012. The special issue, in partnership with Blackmores, was filled with loads of wellbeing content relevant to the findings of the survey.

Bespoke content and creative

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Female’s likelihood to recommend Blackmores Caltrate Vitamin D shifted

significantly: +16% pts

Purchase Intention +9% pts

Brand Favourability +9% pts

Brand Recommendation +7% pts

Brand Consideration +6% pts

06Smashing Results

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT Anna Lenart on (02) 9282 1193

Exposure to the campaign in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and Sunday Life magazine helped Blackmores maintain its top ranking in the competitive set. “

”

Reader Event

Impressive Results.

05‘What Women Want’ Reader Event

A special event was held at Sydney’s The Ivy on Nov 12th 2012, hosted by Jessica Rowe and sponsored by Blackmores, attracting over 100 Sunday Life and Daily Life readers.

An invitation was promoted within Sunday Life and on Daily Life, to encourage readers to attend.

Guest speakers on the panel included; Jacinta Tynan, Jane Caro, Kerri Sackville, Tara Moss, Emily Maguire and Paula Joye, who discussed body and health, sex and relationships, family, career, money and more.

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