Insights revealed through sweat and coffee
Writing on effectiveness for the IPA blog, I was asked how at the agency Mohawk we strive to uncover the most powerful insight to solve a problem, then how we turn that insight into a compelling piece of communications.
Here’s a tweaked extract from the examples cited for sports nutrition brand Bulk Powders and newsbrand The Guardian. I wanted to convey how an insight can not only activate a great piece of communications but how initiatives can become insight drivers in themselves.
In both cases, digital tools developed at the agency Mohawk were essential to gather data.
At Mohawk we have developed our own set of digital customer engagement tools to help brands further understand their audience, we call these suite of tools Noah (www.noahinsights.com). They have lead to a series of insights that allowed both unique creative approaches and new business directions, applications and implications.
These include plastering images of a naked man across London for a sports nutrition brand, Bulk Powders or opening a coffee shop for the Guardian.
Let me explain how we arrived at these creative solutions, where data capture and continued dialogue with the audience was key.
For Bulk Powders we hit our playground, the gym. We spoke to gym-goers, many of whom professed to stealing admiring glances towards those who sported the ‘lean & fit’ look championed by those featured on the cover of magazines such as Men’s Health. It was this look that provided our target gym users with an goal to aspire to.
It was this inspiration that lead to the core insight at the heart of the brief; that this aspirational goal was more important as a mindset. We called this creative platform, ‘The Bulk State of Mind’, where the product was only part of the mix in the self-betterment that our target audience were looking for. The client internalises this now as the 'Kung Fu Panda' moment, a reference to that film’s notion that self belief makes things possible.
Bulk Powders is a Challenger Brand, and as such we had freedom to think and act differently.
We got to a place where being naked was the hyper-real manifestation of having total body confidence, also gave differentiation to competitor brands such as Protein World, who attracted negative publicity and were accused of ‘body shaming’ their target audience.
The chart below demonstrates the key difference between the campaign messaging. #RevealYourself was always (and still is) a platform for empowerment, something that externalises the feeling of confidence that comes with the positive application of mind and body.
The #RevealYourself hashtag/call to action alluded to the fact that to get your goal ‘look’ will take effort and you could be open about your journey but feel supported by the community along the way.
The hashtag, while not 100% unique to the brand, was enough to aggregate media posts which Bulk Powders could amplify and re-publish through their own channels and for people new to the brand to feel inspired by others.
A blend of insights and timing amplified the campaign at a time of year (post- Christmas) when the generic cultural mindset was more responsive to changes in habits, particularly around fitness and wellbeing.
In addition, the writer Mark Simpson had described the rise of the spornosexual, an evolution of the metrosexual archetype with hybrid athlete/porn star qualities - the new male glamour model, one might say. So we were tapping into a relevant cultural trend, making the movement even more powerful.
This evidence that we had captured the zeitgeist persuaded us that our core insight rung true. Banking on the idea that our target audience would respond to male imagery became an ever more valid decision. Our creative approach was well received by audiences with different gender and sexual preference characteristics.
Bulk used the tag to galvanise their community and managed a UK trending topic shortly after the second phase of the campaign which featured a positive female image (see main article picture) in tandem with a male creative route.
Our research gave us the tools to make the right creative leap extending the campaign across gender, both avoiding any negative publicity and creating a positive comparison in a crowded market.
Insights fuelled by coffee
In a related vein, we are also often asked about the insights which percolated into the creative and strategic solution of opening a branded pop-up coffee shop for the Guardian in Shoreditch, east London.
Slightly different from Bulk Powders, this was an example of an exciting experiment with driving insights at its heart.
#GuardianCoffee was born out of a conceptual idea for a pitch to drive customer growth of the Guardian’s digital products. We strove to create an environment for the Guardian’s audience, so we made a thematic 'coffee shop' – a nod to the origins of newspapers and their distribution in coffee houses – part of our strategy.
If we wanted to learn about Guardian users, then the experience needed to feel like a place to gather, share and discuss ideas, ultimately driving customer engagement and knowledge.
By creating a physical manifestation of a newsbrand, we would provide Guardian readers and writers alike with a platform to learn about different audiences, developing bespoke tools to aid the process.
The shop was named #GuardianCoffee as an invitation for it to be validated within the public, open realm of social media.
The #GuardianCoffee hashtag name blew up into a Twitter trend pretty quickly, with it came furious debate, satire, memes and even anger. Crazy at the time, It all seems like a bit of a storm in a coffee cup now, as every shop at Boxpark now has a hashtag name. Roger Wade, CEO of Boxpark happy to acknowledge the buzz around the coffee shop inspired this move.
Within the coffee shop, our interactive screens and features had 'Playful Engagement' at their heart. We enabled surveys and polls that were tactile and fun - the polar opposite of the default Survey Monkey type experience.
We knew that if we wanted to reap genuinely new insights, a visit to the café had to match the user experience that the Guardian is lauded for, especially in a part of London where socially active millennial tech-bods congregate.
The insights we drove also had to be valuable to the audience, namely, the digital natives who were keen to chime in with attitudes toward trends in media and news consumption. All live data collected was therefore openly replayed back to the audience via media surfaces in the café and through more conventional channels such as email.
The bespoke tools we developed and used in #guardiancoffee were so successful in gathering data and insights, that we packaged them all up and created a business from them, very mindful of the fact that agencies need to diversify and explore new revenue streams.
We now market these tools as Noah (www.noahinsights.com) — a suite of ‘out of the box’ digital tools that include iPad optimised polling, survey, quiz and game interactives, plus a media wall solution and CRM/reporting tools.
My point of view is that if you want to drive insights, especially in real-world scenarios — the environment in which you place these tools and the surrounding customer experience is key to success.
While insights were at the heart of answering this brief, we also know that customer experience design is paramount for any experience. We are incredibly proud to have our work recognised, as #GuardianCoffee won a DMA Gold for Best Design and Art Direction in any medium.
The early foray into a physical manifestation of the Guardian brand soon spawned a sister store deployed by Mohawk stateside, to garner insights from cultural tastemakers in New York. This time, we placed the brand within another brand that we knew the core audience would be comfortable with, the influential Rough Trade record store. Within we deployed the Noah tools there to engage and learn from the audience.
The #GuardianCoffee and #GuardianGreenRoom showed that readers would really respond to a physical representation of the Guardian brand.
These real world spaces further strengthen the Guardian’s open principles and two-way dialogue with a beloved audience. These true advocates, can effectively now ‘join’ the Guardian via a membership scheme.
Members can attend events and seminars and even get access to the newsroom. At these events our Noah Broadcast solution will form a backdrop for discussion, encouraging engagement via social media at events.
The general public can get closer still to the Guardian brand and attend ‘masterclasses’, where a variety of courses are offered from web design & journalism to cookery.
In a nice full circle connection of the strategy outlined in these case studies, there is also a ‘masterclass’ in how to launch a pop-up. From our experience it’s worth the sweat, with greatest reward being the two way conversations so critical in revealing those all important insights.
If you would like to learn more about how Noah’s digital customer engagement tools can help in uncovering insights, get in touch at labs@mohawkhq.com
