One of the key takeaways from this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity was that the conversation around Creative Effectiveness has never been louder! But just being bold and creative is not enough.
Achieving international success, i.e., developing a campaign that resonates across multiple markets, is often desired but as we know, a huge challenge. Just around 43% of the ads tested by Kantar that are strong in one country are strong in another. And an ad that is strong in one country has just a 20 - 25% chance of being strong in three others. The reasons for this are often complex and dependent on many factors, such as brand status, competitive context, and cultural differences.
Only the best campaign ideas successfully travel across markets because they leverage a clear insight and harness this to the brand purpose and product proposition.
How do we know? At Kantar, we test thousands of creative assets every year and have the world’s largest advertising database with over 250.000 ads from across the Globe. Our LINK+ ad testing solution delivers a prediction of ad performance on precisely this key aspect with validated KPIs that have been proven to correlate with campaign in-market impact, as the recent collaboration with WARC and evidence-based correlation with ROMI proves. Every year we celebrate the best creative and effective ads with our Kantar Creative Effective Awards based on Link ad testing solution results.
Great campaign ideas can transcend cultural boundaries
One of our top global winners this year was BSH (the home appliances division of Bosch Group)with their successful #LikeABosch campaign. We had the pleasure to host BSH and their lead agency Jung von Matt at the Kantar apartment in Cannes this year to talk about their journey to Global Advertising Success.
#LikeABosch is a great example of what strong campaign ideas can achieve. Many campaigns that have successfully delivered impact at a global level have authentically harnessed the brand and product advantage to the consumer insight as the starting point.
Arriving at this sweet spot is definitely easier said than done, especially for companies operating across a wide range of geographies - where brand perceptions can differ - and covering a multitude of product or service categories.
The Bosch Group is a leading global supplier of technology and services in the areas of Mobility, Industrial Technology, Consumer Goods, and Energy and Building Technology. Bosch improves quality of life worldwide with products and services that are innovative and spark enthusiasm. Bosch creates technology that is “Invented for life.”
In 2018, the Bosch Group reinvented itself as an Internet of Things (IoT) company. Lead Agency Jung von Matt was tasked with creating a campaign idea to bring this new focus to life and combine the heritage of the German industrial powerhouse with the image of a modern technology company with cutting edge solutions for living in today’s world. The brief they got was very short: Bosch = IoT = cool.
What they came up with had all the makings of a globally successful big idea. Inspired by the internet phenomenon “Like a Boss”, which stood for doing things in a smart and cool way, the creative idea of living and doing things #LikeABosch, and thus living and doing things smart and cool, was born.
This new creative platform kicked off with a video ad that did not look like an ad but felt much more like a music video in which the audience followed a character called Shawn - a nerdy guy with a mustache and a Beatles haircut, quirky and larger than life - going through his day and using all kinds of smart, connected Bosch products around his home, and all while rapping about the product benefits to a cool beat with a #LikeABosch refrain.
Not only did the core of the campaign idea of living and doing things #LikeABosch hit that sweet spot at the intersection of insight, brand purpose and product advantage, this new approach was bold and disruptive with talk value and able to transcend cultural boundaries. The initial IoT #LikeABosch campaign launch was an explosive success with over 26M views on YouTube.
Conquering advertising challenges with a great “Big Idea”
As part of the Bosch Group, BSH is a leading global company and Europe’s #1 brand for home appliances. For its Bosch brand, BHS traditionally faced the advertising challenge of:
- Breaking through the clutter in a highly competitive market context
- Advertising multiple product categories
- Communicating overarching brand purpose themes like sustainability and healthy living
- As well as attracting younger target groups
- And all of this - while still being consistent with the Bosch brand values.
So what was the BSH mission? To win the home #LikeABosch: “Our products work Like a Bosch … so you can feel Like a Bosch”. With the brand promise and product advantages of innovation, technology, efficiency, sustainability, longevity to name a few, consumers could feel smart, responsible, proud, cool, enthusiastic, economical and so on.
From both a brand and a creative perspective, Jung von Matt’s #LikeABosch idea ticked all the right boxes, for when brands operate in more countries, in more channels and in a more agile way than ever before, leveraging a successful ‘big idea’ provides huge advantages:
- It provides a unifying theme and a framework within which a brand can work
- It delivers a base for content over channels and time
- It brings the brand message to life
- It creates a point of reference when it comes to how the brand talks to people
- It ensures consistency and for consumers easily recognisable interactions with the brand.
Kantar partnered BSH with Qualitative and Quantitative research across different markets to test and learn how far the BIG IDEA behind the campaign could be transferred to Bosch Home Appliances Division and aligned with strategic goals. Learnings, insights, and watchouts fed into executional development as the campaign progressed beyond Shawn – keeping but evolving the rap music video style whilst communicating innovative product features in a humorous and visually impactful way alongside supporting overarching purpose topics. Central to the resonance of the campaign, the quirky, larger than life characters that visually encapsulated the quintessential #LikeABosch feeling, offering many situations in the home for consumers to identify with.
“Since the beginning, „Like a Bosch“ was pretested and tested in all corners of the world. And it has impressively proven to boost all brand KPIs (brand awareness, first choice, traffic to brand touch points)”. Javier González Granda, Head of Communication, Bosch Region Europe
The #LikeABosch campaign is now the most successful campaign ever for Bosch, conquering hearts across the world from many different nationalities, delivering global advertising success and successfully working across all media touchpoints. Within the Bosch universe the #LikeABosch Creative Platform has been leveraged across different divisions, most recently in a new UK campaign for Bosch Thermotechnik advertising home heating appliances but also for e.g., for Bosch Power Tools or for Bosch Car Service.
“It started as a “Like a Boss” meme on the web and has grown into our most successful campaign to date. But for us, #LikeABosch is much more than that: It drives us to constantly find new ways to make your life even more practical, sustainable, and simply better with smart technology”.
#LikeABosch has gone beyond a campaign and become a movement.
In summary, #LikeABosch is a fantastic example of the power of a big idea and how far it can go, if done right even across borders. For us at Kantar the experience together with BSH and Jung von Matt was yet again proof that market research does not kill great ideas but can help to make sure that they unfold their full impact – Creative + Effective!
