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smart has built a position as one of the most iconic and unique car brands of recent decades. smart has both personality and cachet, combining the attributes of freedom, eco-friendliness, safety and the Mercedes-Benz heritage in what has become the ultimate symbol of modern urban living.
Building on its appeal as an expression of individuality for today’s thinking city dwellers, smart has teamed up with the high-end after-market tuning and customization specialists BRABUS to develop the smart BRABUS tailor made concept.
To launch the smart BRABUS tailor made, agency partner Weapon7 created an innovative digitally lead integrated campaign.
Brief
The primary objectives of the campaign were to further boost perception of smart as a brand with great individuality and to encourage consideration of smart, delivering potential customers into the top of the funnel for the entire smart range.
Strategy
The campaign utilised Weapon7’s “Tempt-Engage-Build” model of band interaction. The tempt stage was an eye-catching front end capable of capturing the consumer’s emotional interest while leading them on to a deeper interactive engagement with the product.
An essential strategic outcome of the brief was for the communication to be highly customer-centric, knowing that the expression of individuality is key to the mindset of the smart target customer.
Equally fundamental to the strategy was that the approach must be multi-channel and seamlessly integrated in both media planning and creative development. In some industry sectors, campaign architecture still tends to follow a traditional ‘through-the-line’ approach, where online, press and other media play a secondary role, simply reflecting and supporting a central execution designed for broadcast TV. The automotive sector by contrast has been ahead of the curve in adopting a truly integrated approach, where a central, media-neutral, creative thought is expressed synergistically across a variety of channels, so that the whole campaign is greater than the sum of its individual parts. smart had clear expectations that the campaign would form a harmonious piece, not a series of disconnected ( if individually effective) threads.
Execution
The central element of the campaign was a highly interactive microsite, allowing the customer to completely personalise a smart fortwo in real time. Important functional deliverables included the speed and smoothness of the flash MPU and the emphasis on ultimate flexibility. For example colours were not limited to a range of options but were ultimately customisable to literally any choice, and every panel and visible element, down to the stitching on the seats could be individually customised. To encourage the audience to dwell and play with the module, creative us was made of voice, with a quirky, friendly commentary encouraging the viewer to explore further and suggesting possibilities they might like to experiment with. However, the module was also designed to function fully without audio.
The user could even customise the site itself, altering background colours and fonts to show their creation off to best effect, before saving their personal creation and sharing as a desktop wallpaper, via email, mobile or their chosen social network, including Destinationsmart, the online community for smart enthusiasts. An application for iPhone was developed in partnership with mobile specialists Ymogen to encourage users to both play with the concept on the move and to encourage sharing. By shaking the phone, an additional fun element of randomisation was introduced.
Each online ad was potentially unique and a selection of real users’ designs were served to each viewer. The user was then able to re-arrange and re-design the execution and their new creation was immediately served across all media destinations in real time, so that the next customer would see the previous user’s personal named design, rather than a standard execution. As with the microsite, customisation extended beyond the car to the ad itself, with changeable colours and layouts: online advertising living up to the promise of ‘it’s what you make it’.
Bringing this offline was an executional challenge, achieved in a truly integrated fashion through press inserts and direct mail. Both pieces included images of the smart with key elements die cut out eg body panels, to allow the recipient to experiment with the different coloured panels supplied. Recipients were encouraged to explore the customisation of the car and to go online and explore further possibilities via search and URL.
Integration with the dealer network was achieved via clever offline point-of-sale materials, using lenticular displays to show off a bewildering array of colour combinations as the customer walks past.
All elements in the mix were presented, keeping the customer central and using the proposition that, with smart BRABUS tailor made ‘it’s what you make it’.
Jeremy Garner, Creative Director at Weapon7 said: “This was an exciting project; a good chance to emphasise the personalisation promise of the car using a tight mix of creativity, technology and print production techniques. It’s a wide and varied integrated campaign.”
“The journey from broad consideration onwards is lengthy and zig-zagging , with innumerable dealer, review and price comparison sites all competing for the online audience’s attention. The campaign made effective use of both organic and paid search and a broad range of media touchpoints where the interactive MPU was presented”, added Richard Moloney, Account Director at Weapon7
Results
Sites involving deep interaction with consumers can be challenging. They are not designed to provide the broad reach of simple display advertising impressions. The team were explicit and transparent in goal setting for the campaign. The more involved the process of interaction…the ‘bigger the ask’…the lower will be the number completing the process. “But clients like smart understand that the quality and depth of those brand interactions amongst a clearly defined target audience is immeasurably higher than a simple impression, or one-click action by an undifferentiated mass audience” says Moloney.
Both client and agency were delighted when the campaign exceeded KPI’s. Depth of interaction and sharing were the key deliverables in terms of customer behaviour.
The average dwell time on the microsite was nearly 5 minutes, which is exceptional for a campaign site being actively driven from online display advertising and search, where dwell times normally decline in strongly inverse proportion to the volume of traffic delivered into the site. So it’s clear that relevant consumers were being driven to view the microsite, and were liking what they found when they got there.
There were over 1,200 completed designs shared from the site, with mobile performing extremely well, plus another 1,400 downloads of the iPhone app. At one time 173 members of the Destinationsmart community were using their personal smart-BRABUS creations as their profile picture.
Claire Irving, Marketing Communications at smart said: “smart needs to capture the attention of those who prefer not to follow the crowd and who have confidence in their own choices. smart BRABUS tailor made allows us to make customer-centricity a real, deliverable product proposition, not merely an advertising concept. By putting the customer at the centre of the creative and the media mechanic, we really impressed upon our target audience that, with smart, you’re the boss. We were able to maintain a very tightly integrated and coherent campaign across digital and offline media channels, right through to the dealer showroom”.
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