Better Battery Campaign
Stiga
Stiga needed an integrated campaign to launch new ranges of battery powered garden machines.
Post-pandemic, timings were squeezed so a quick response and fast turnaround were paramount.
We’d been working on a new ‘innovation’ positioning and culture shift with the HQ team and were eager to move them forward. So we set about finding their Better in these new product ranges.
Our competitor audit showed that the marketplace was beginning to get saturated with brands making similar noises about shareable battery systems. Their messaging was undifferentiated with a generic wallpaper of ‘convenience’. But what about battery performance?
We interrogated the engineers at Stiga, specifically the battery experts, and started to uncover that the specification of the batteries in Stiga products was in fact quite different from others. In the entry-level range, the batteries had a PCB (printed circuit board) inside that enabled the battery to communicate with the tool it was powering and adjust the power output accordingly - optimising its performance for each given tool. In the premium range, the battery composition was such that it could retain over 80% of its capacity even after 600 charges – up to 10 years’ worth of use.
We dug for the testing protocol and substantiation then constructed a lead narrative for the campaign around the batteries instead of just the machines themselves. This brought the ‘Better’ to the fore and created real differences from competing brands. We then developed visual communications to demonstrate the technological advantages of Stiga’s batteries. While doing so we created a new visual language for photographing Stiga’s premium range, using colour, angles and lighting techniques to disrupt the category and be more memorable. We also created a new graphic framework that systematically joined up the different campaign elements to present a cohesive brand.
In parallel we introduced Stiga to a new media agency and worked closely with both parties to build out personas for each range, map customer journeys and then execute the creative work to tie the campaign together across multiple touch points – online, in physical retail, across social media platforms, in the press, and on large scale outdoor advertising.
The campaign assets were required in February for activation in early spring and it was snowing outside. So we brought in a production company to shoot all the imagery and film in a specially created garden set within a studio. Execution and production ran at pace with us scripting and art directing 13 films that brought the ‘Better Battery’ story to life, showcasing each of the machines within the ranges. There were over a hundred stills taken and we finally delivered translation-ready asset templates for outdoor, press and digital advertising assets along with in-store ticketing for the three different ranges being launched across Europe.
The whole process took just 5 months, punctuated by Christmas.
The Result
Internal alignment around a meaningfully superior ‘Better Battery’ proposition.
A seamlessly integrated campaign with a single-minded message that unpacked the previously hidden value within Stiga machines that had real standout from the competition.
A full suite of rich media assets for deployment across all campaign executions Europe-wide.
A campaign that would act as a prototype and future direction standard for a company mindset and brand gearing up to go through fundamental change.
