Struggle juggle: ITV, Loose Women and cultural relevance

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In 2018, the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (Barb) analysis for UK daytime panel show Loose Women showed that, while the programme was maintaining share, it was flat, against a backdrop of other shows experiencing year-on-year growth.

This led to broadcaster ITV questioning how it could future-proof the programme and ensure it remained culturally relevant for its predominantly female viewership.

Lucy Crotty, cultural insight and strategy lead at ITV, led a semiotics analysis followed by qualitative research, with the findings used to inform creative development, helping editors and producers make decisions about topics and panellists.

Real language

An initial trends and semiotics analysis explored the research question of what it meant to be a ‘modern woman today’. The research used the Jungian framework of female cultural archetypes and incorporated semiotics to identify potential challenges to that – for example, parenthood.

“If you look at the framework, something like ‘the caregiver’ feels so one-dimensional,” says Crotty. “Whereas, when you start to analyse women who are mothers and have a voice across media, what was inherent about the modern mother’s experience of femalehood is that it’s a struggle juggle. We saw that breaking into the mainstream.”

It was important for the research to employ clear language for stakeholders, as the programme makers needed tangible insights that would make sense within the context of its mainstream appeal.

“When I went into my first briefing, I was talking about ‘intersectionality’ – that’s such an academic word,” says Crotty. “We’re ITV; we’re a mainstream brand; we have a heritage in entertainment as much as we have an inherent ability to inform the nation. Toeing the line between something that’s entertaining for a viewer but also sends an important message is something the editors battle with constantly, so using academic terms instantly gets their backs up.”

So, rather than discussing ‘Jungian archetypes’, the research used pithy language to describe these, says Crotty. “It’s not the ‘caregiver’, it’s the ‘struggle juggle’ mother – or it’s framing the ‘joker’ as the ‘funny everywoman’.”

Painting a picture

After establishing some pictures of what womanhood looks like – both dominant and emerging – the researchers used qual to test the narratives. In focus groups in London, Birmingham and Leeds, projective techniques were used to encourage participants to share their feelings on sensitive subjects, including racism.

Around 60% of the focus group participants were nationally representative and the rest was comprised of participants from black and Asian backgrounds, to understand their perspectives on how the show could better cater for their needs. Crotty asked participants to draw and annotate what they perceived to be a ‘typical Loose Women viewer’ – the result was “a white woman with long blonde hair with a relatively privileged life”.

One of the key pieces of feedback was that they said they would never expect to see an all-black female panel on a programme such as Loose Women. They also wanted to see a more multifaceted portrayal of black and Asian women – not just panellists who are singers and entertainers. The programme later featured an all-black panel, stemming from the focus group findings.

Emerging from both the semiotics and qual was the sense that the programme should push boundaries, says Crotty, and balance that with its “laugh at lunchtime” positioning. “The pattern was starting to build that Loose Women should exist to break boundaries. So, we had to cover more taboo subjects in an educational, informative way, balanced and offset against the more humorous elements of life – and that was going to be our Trojan horse.”

After the research, the show experienced the first share of viewing growth in three years ( 14.2%) in 2019, according to ITV.

Cultural analysis for commercial insight

• For a mainstream brand, strip out the academia – reframe academic language with entertaining, evocative language
• Be as descriptive as possible, visually and verbally
• Constantly check in with the stakeholder
• Use enabling techniques in qualitative research. Crotty says: “We didn’t run a bog-standard focus group. We used all of the stimulus and weaved it into the debrief.

This article was first published in the April 2021 issue of Impact.