Pure Leaf’s TikTok hotline helps women navigate pressure to be sweet

• Pure Leaf established a TikTok “hotline” for giving women advice with actor and singer Coco Jones, per a press release from PepsiCo. The tie-up promotes the new Subtly Sweet Lower Sugar Iced Teas from Pure Leaf, a brand that comes under the Pepsi Lipton Tea partnership between PepsiCo and Unilever.
• Questions for the Subtly Sweet “Hotline” center around women navigating the expectation to always appear sweet, even when they don’t really feel that way. Those interested in hearing practical tips from Jones can leave a comment on her TikTok profile starting today (Aug. 2) at noon ET.
• The social push is part of a larger “No is Beautiful” platform from Pure Leaf that links a positioning around no artificial ingredients to people setting hard boundaries, like saying “no” to extra work hours, and instead prioritize things that are fulfilling.

Pure Leaf is tackling tricky social mores through the partnership with Jones, a multi-hyphenate talent who stars on Peacock’s “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” reboot, “Bel-Air.” The campaign ties the idea of women feeling the pressure to be sweet in situations that make them uncomfortable to a new line of tea beverages that carry lower sugar via a shared theme of sweet not always being a good thing.

In resurrecting the somewhat antiquated idea of a hotline, the concept shows the PepsiCo label trying to balance an empowering message with a sense of fun and interactivity. Examples of the types of questions Jones will field include “Do I bend over backwards to help a friend who never reciprocates?” or whether to grin and nod at a rude customer at work. Jones analyzes these everyday scenarios and then doles out practical wisdom via her TikTok page, which has over 2.1 million followers.

Collaborating with an established creator could help Pure Leaf reach a broader audience on TikTok, which has grown crowded with brand activity as it continues to see meteoric user growth. The video-sharing app’s audience also tends to skew toward the younger side, suggesting Pure Leaf could be chasing Gen Z and millennials who also fall into the target demo for “Bel-Air,” a grittier, more dramatic reimagining of the beloved ‘90s sitcom tailored to the streaming era.

Pure Leaf joins other marketers in promoting self-care to consumers, in this case learning to say “no” to exhausting social and career expectations and “yes” to activities that make them happy. Self-care has appeared in brand communications for years but could resonate more during the pandemic, which has made burnout more common.

Heineken is currently running a campaign that addresses work-life “imbalance” and how people have a harder time shutting things down at the end of the day. To remedy the problem, the beer marketer developed a device called The Closer, a Bluetooth-enabled bottle opener that simultaneously shuts down work apps at the snap of a cap.