Case Study - DEW
How-to launch a brand online and start selling right away
It’s an old truth in advertising: advertising can be only as good as the product it tries to sell. But even a great product doesn’t sell itself.
One day you find yourself in a meeting room in Antwerp with 3 entrepreneurs who created these brilliant backpacks. They had done everything right. The backpacks featured a razor-sharp minimalistic design with clever features for everyday usability. They also had a pretty good idea of who they wanted to sell it to and the first production batches looked promising. A swift funding of their Kickstarter campaign proved that the backpacks had sales potential. They already thought of a name too: DEW.
Now it was time to market. That’s where Brandtag came in.
How are we going to launch a new brand and immediately start selling the backpacks?
Branding of a Backpack
First, we organised our Brandtag Social Workshop. In this intensive half-day session we let DEW answer 6 questions which eventually lead to the Social Strategy. This approach offers several advantages:
an efficient transfer from the clients knowledge to Brandtag
active participation - and thus: more profound understanding - of the branding process
buy-in for essential choices: KPI’s, channels, etc.
a strategy that isn’t based on educated guesses, but on real insights and business needs
2 weeks after the meeting, our strategy was clear.
First, we defined a storyline that set DEW apart from its competitors and made it into a baseline:
“MADE TO SURVIVE THE URBAN JUNGLE.”
We then decided we needed a short movie for our social channels to raise brand awareness. The creative minds at Kopstoot nailed the strategy perfectly with The drop, a movie we spread on Instagram and Facebook.
From Social to Sales
Inline with our brand strategy, we decided to launch the backpacks first in the most vibrant cities of Europe: Berlin, Barcelona, Antwerp, London. We then targeted our movie to the right demographics we had defined in the workshop.
Those who had seen the movie until the end, were then retargeted with social ads that highlighted specific features of the backpacks. This allowed us to do efficient micro-targeting, e.g. if someone with the right demographics had seen our video and was interested in surfing, we showed him the waterproof features of the DEW backpacks.
This approach allowed us to learn how our target audiences responded to our ads at a minimal cost before we rolled them out in more cities. Once we started converting our website visitors into real clients, we increased our advertising budget in function of sales.
Advertising Crash Course
Once the strategy was laid out, DEW was eager to implement it themselves. So we gave them a crash course in Facebook Advertising and they were ready to roll. From analysis to planning and actually advertising: the DEW crew does it all. Resulting not only in clever ads, but tangible sales. Proof? DEW is about to release a third line. Not bad for a brand that didn’t even exist a year ago…