The Trane HVAC brand has a humanity issue. “It’s Hard to Stop a Trane” is an iconic tagline that has earned the brand a well-established reputation with both B2B and B2C audiences, but there has been a struggle to expand the tagline beyond their products to make it more personally relatable. Particularly in the social media space, Trane’s heavy focus on equipment was falling flat within the sea of more relatable, people-centric content. As the social media agency for Trane’s residential sector, we were challenged to bring the brand’s “It’s Hard to Stop a Trane” tagline to life in a social-first way that helps HVAC dealers educate and engage consumers about Trane’s industry-leading performance while still making the brand feel within reach. Outside of the social space and inside homes all over the country, HVAC dealers have conversations with homeowners directly. Therefore, the “Tyler Tested” content series aimed to equip our B2B audience with more engaging ways (compared to a product one-sheeter with technical jargon and complicated specs) to sell Trane units to consumers during “kitchen table” conversations, and ultimately increase traffic and drive downloads from Trane’s dealer portal.
Every Trane unit is put through extreme environmental testing at a lab in Tyler, Texas, by highly skilled scientists and engineers to ensure optimal performance. And while testing for these few-in-a-product-lifetime events like extreme heat, torrential ice, and hurricane force impact are important to prove product quality and durability, the average consumer is more concerned about their Trane unit handling everyday, backyard extremes. “Tyler Tested” was developed to bring “It’s Hard to Stop a Trane” testing out of the lab and onto the lawn.
In the age of the vertical video content creator, our resident HVAC nerd, Tyler, speaks directly to the homeowner, taking Trane’s premium engineering out of the laboratory and into the real world. And the real world is jam-packed with real threats to the functionality of your HVAC system.
Using light-hearted humor and playing a variety of characters, Tyler translates Trane’s unique benefits into bite-sized content that entertains and educates. The over-the-top parodies capture attention and bring a consumer perspective to taking on the everyday obstacles facing your HVAC – be they stray baseballs, sleeping babies, a garage band, or burgers on a 500-degree grill.
Tyler Tested personifies Trane’s notorious “It’s Hard to Stop a Trane” tagline with a social media approachability that embodies the concept of “edu-tainment.” Whether you’re an HVAC professional or a homeowner, you look to social media to entertain first and inform second. Tyler Tested brings a new approach to B2B social media content for Trane, using humor and a peer-like narrator to engage HVAC professionals on a more niche and personal level that puts them in their customer’s shoes with a laugh, wink, and a nod. This series incorporates Trane’s many product benefits through entertaining, bite-sized content that appeals to our B2B2C audiences in what is a typically straightforward and unimaginative category.
Working with a production budget of just $18,000, we made five Tyler Tested videos highlighting real homeowner concerns: extreme heat, water intake, force impact, noise, and vibrations, and released them on Instagram and Facebook without paid media support. With so many paths to purchase for choosing to install a Trane, directly correlating HVAC system sales to organic social video content is difficult. However, by garnering strong B2B engagement through purely organic efforts, HVAC professionals now have easily accessible content to share with their end customers that address real homeowner concerns, prompting productive conversations and reasons to believe at the point of sale. The Tyler Tested series helped the entire Trane ecosystem realize that it’s hard to ignore the influence of social content on purchase decisions just like “It’s Hard to Stop a Trane.”
