Case study – SHOPPER – Essity
Redefining a care brand for Essity
Global hygiene and health company Essity’s new menopause care brand, Issviva, had a clear vision and strong brand guidelines. Ahead of launching in the UK, they wanted to make sure their visual identity and tone of voice would genuinely connect with the women they were designed for.
The challenge: Closing the empathy gap between brand and consumer
Menopause is a category where language and representation matter. Get it wrong, and you risk alienating the very women the brand exists for. Issviva needed to know that every creative decision it made, from fonts and colours to photography and mission statements, reflected what real women actually want from menopause care.
What we did: We applied LENS to uncover what women really needed to hear
LENS is Magenta’s proprietary framework combining discourse analysis and semiotics. We applied discourse analysis to existing focus group transcripts, examining the real language women used when discussing perimenopause and menopause. Alongside this, semiotic analysis mapped changing cultural representations of menopause over time, identifying both mainstream and emergent cultural codes to pinpoint where Issviva sat within a broader cultural trajectory.
What we found: The brand had an opportunity to fill a real empathy gap
The research revealed a disconnect between how menopause was being represented in culture and how women were actually living and talking about it. Issviva had the opportunity to speak in a way that felt real, relevant and meaningfully different.
The impact: A brand rewritten from the inside out
Magenta made bold recommendations across fonts, colours, photography and mission statements. Ahead of launch, Issviva rewrote its brand lexicon entirely.
“The impact of Magenta’s LENS approach has been transformative. By integrating semiotics and discourse analysis, the insight has fundamentally changed our brand’s visual identity and tone of voice. I now have complete confidence that we are connecting with our target consumers in a way that truly resonates — a level of certainty I simply did not have before.”
Global Brand and Innovation Manager, Essity
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