Global street wear brand Bench were going through a period of change, reclaiming the creativity, energy and diversity that made them a worldwide name.
They were seeking to reposition the brand around technical apparel and wanted to use their core product, the technical hoodie, as the showpiece product to do it with.
They had an ambition to create brand buzz and drive awareness in their target market: 24-28-year-old professionals from urban areas across Europe, the USA and Canada.
The objective was to harness the emotions people feel for their go-to hoodies; the sentiment, the nostalgia – and to make Bench synonymous with this choice item of clothing.
We had to take ownership of the hoodie's iconic silhouette and use it as a device to celebrate the hood, its heritage and the neighbourhoods where it's worn.
We started by looking at the audience. Where they go, what they like. We weighed it up against Bench's objectives and found commonalities in places we didn't expect.
We were fascinated by the emotions people attach to their favourite hoodies. We saw that they're personal, comforting and they make a statement.
The result of this insight was #LoveMyHood. We built a social-first, user-generated campaign around our hashtag. It kick-started on social media, quickly graduating to a global level with out-of-home and point-of-sale assets helping to spread the word.
#LoveMyHood gave Bench's biggest fans and advocates a call to action. It gave them a reason to tell their own stories by sharing and tagging their favourite hoodie snaps. Thanks to intelligent collaboration with Twitter and Instagram APIs, we were able to pull this content straight from their feeds. After a quick approval process, assets were immediately uploaded to lovemyhood.me, the home of the campaign and the place we directed our audience to.
This responsive, multilingual microsite was the Geiger counter of our campaign's impact, presenting location-based content to the right international audiences. It collated all of the user-generated #LoveMyHood content into one, brand-championing space.
We then applied our "hood" tagline to push the campaign into metropolitan environments, collaborating with Bench's PR agency to promote and run real-time events in the coolest urban hotspots. From these we live-tweeted and shared branded content featuring testimonies from trend-setters and cultural influencers across the worlds of music, travel, fashion and technology.
These influencers shared branded content across their social media channels, while we promoted paid media with Vines and Bench-centric clips. The events allowed people to celebrate the pride they feel for their hometowns, or "hoods."
As influencers and brand advocates engaged with these events, it created content that amplified the campaign to a global audience.
Thanks to expert granular targeting that maximised a modest budget, we managed to generate over 36 million impressions across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Vine – a massive improvement in the brand's social visibility.
On top of this increased exposure, #LoveMyHood spawned 48,163 campaign engagements across platforms – from 'Likes' to RTs, 'hearts' and Vines.
Thousands of these engagements were images, videos and stories from across the world that were collected, moderated and presented on the microsite to breathe life into the campaign.
With Instagram being such a key part of this process, we were able to more than double Bench's following on the platform in just three months.
The client said:
"mycleverTM Agency did a fantastic job in delivering a platform and social
campaign that met our brief, hit our objectives and generated great global
results.
From design stage, to full back end management of the user-generated
Content, their team worked with Twitter and Instragram APIs to pull entries
from both platforms. They are a local agency with a global mindset and I
have thoroughly enjoyed working with them on several projects."
Emily Frazer
Head of Marketing at Bench
#LoveMyHood was so powerful that Bench evolved the concept. They made it the focus of their global brand marketing strategy for the entire year, setting in stone their new offering to a younger, more engaged audience.
