4 CATEGORY 2: Best use of DM


WINNER:Kern Precision Scales AGENCY:WUNDERMAN CAMPAIGN:‘KERN PRECISION WEIGHING’


sensitive scales and weights, capable of weighing to a staggering seven decimal places. Its customers include scientists, pharmacists and engineers. However, despite its impressive capabilities, precision scales have become commoditised and there is very little to differentiate suppliers.


K As well as boost leads and sales,


Wunderman was briefed to create brand equity for Kern – and make their precision scales much more desirable.


The agency launched ‘Kern precision weighing’ – an eight-week campaign that rolled out in July 2009. The campaign targeted end users, buyers of scientific equipment (e.g. for labs, pharmacies, etc.) and resellers who need to offer brands they trust to their customers.


In all cases, the audience was identified


as being extremely intelligent and inquisitive – nothing is more important in their line of work than precision and they’re the kind of people proud to be called ‘geeky’.


The campaign budget was relatively


ern Precision Scales calibrates and distributes a range of the world's most precise and


glue-tipped to the letterhead to encourage prospects to share Kern’s obsession with precision by estimating the weight.


small and Kern had never attempted anything particularly creative before (marketing in this industry is, without exception, product and price-led). Direct mail provided the ideal channel to roll out the campaign and the best way to reach a list of relevant decision makers. A mail pack was created that fit into a larger campaign – ‘Guess the weight contest’. For the direct mail pack, Kern’s entire range of stationery was reprinted, printing the weight of each element – from the letterhead to the compliment slip, to the ink used on the business card. A feather was


RUNNER UP:MetLife AGENCY:TEAMSPIRIT CAMPAIGN:‘TRP DIRECT MAIL’


M


etLife is a worldwide provider of insurance and unit-linked guarantees, and has been helping people with their financial decisions for over 140 years. In 2007, MetLife Europe opened in the UK to provide guaranteed retirement and investment products to help protect against life’s unknowns. The ‘TRP direct mail’ campaign was


born out of MetLife wanting to launch its new Trustee Retirement Portfolio (TRP) product. It had identified that it needed to speak to specialist pension advisers and knew that although the audience it wanted to reach was very small, the potential value that it could deliver was extremely high. Through the use of analytic tools, MetLife was able to identify a range of key accounts to target.


The campaign, which ran for three months, aimed to provide a platform for ongoing conversations between prospects


and the brand, and an impactful way to introduce a MetLife representative. A targeted direct marketing


communications strategy was created that included a DM pack hitting desks on the first day of the campaign. The pack had a suitcase outer, and contained a New York Wallpaper City Guide gift with cover wrap, a personalised letter, bookmark and an informative product leaflet. The incentive was to make an appointment with a MetLife representative in order to win a weekend for two to New York. As the target audience was sophisticated, it was felt that this high value, luxury prize would be suitably appealing to them. MetLife’s brand ambassador, the cartoon character Snoopy, was central to the creative to build brand awareness and to reflect the creative of the above-the-line advertising.


The pack promoted the high chance of winning the trip to New York due to a small


B2B Marketing Awards 2010 - www.b2bmarketingawards.co.uk


audience being communicated with, and was thus highly personalised to make it easy for the adviser to get in touch with their personal MetLife representative. Follow-up calls and a follow-up pack (which included a £10 Starbucks voucher) were also rolled out. By offering a high value incentive to only a small number of advisers, MetLife hoped to ensure that the advisers would feel they had been identified as important and valued customers.


In total, 32 advisers booked an appointment as a direct result of the campaign – an outstanding response rate of 44 per cent against the industry average of 11.5 per cent.


Engineers and pharmacists were also challenged to estimate the weight of extremely low mass objects – items that would be impossible to weigh using anything less than the ‘world’s most precise scales’. After making their estimations, prospects could watch the actual experiments and see the results on Kern’s website. To drive the target audience to the website, Wunderman used emails that posed the weighing challenge and detailed the incentives (£50 credit with Kern was awarded by just by entering, and the prospect who estimated the most accurately won £1000). Results of the campaign included a 24 per cent response rate, resulting in 167 leads.


Thomas Fimpel, marketing director at


Kern, commented, “Aside from the astonishing results, what’s really exciting is that this campaign built our brand. It’s also really original. Nothing like this has been done before in our industry. It made Kern Precision Scales seem sexy.”


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