The question
Building its success in the Smart Home market, Hive knew it must start taking some bold steps to keep pace in a changing world. Its brand, its audience and the category had changed and it was time to adapt.
They needed to address a new type of customer problem. In a smart home category that has matured, customers are emotionally buying into the idea of a smart home long before they purchase their first smart home product.
The challenge was to create a campaign that understood this emotional commitment and helped build excitement about how Hive can help them build the smart connected home they were anticipating.
Our approach
Understanding these personal journeys, needed to be grounded in truths about people’s lives.
Going well beyond dashboards, we immersed ourselves in thousands of different stories about homes, reading them and unpacking the meaning behind each. We also analysed the images people shared about their homes on Instagram – which gave us a sense of the visual aesthetic driving Smart Home choices.
The answer
Hive chose to anchor its campaign in the exciting emotional promise of the Hive Smart Home ecosystem.
Despite of Covid, the campaign that this work informed was a success: it generated a strong sales response above the Hive ad benchmark. The new creative style also paid off, with the campaign standing out and appealing more than the previous year’s (+11% appeal, and +10% salience).
“The insights from Listen and Learn helped to steer a steady course for how to re-think our brand in the evolved smart home space. The L+L team responded quickly to the brief and tight timelines, and seamlessly integrated their insights with other learnings we had. What we ended up with was an enhanced level of consumer understanding – and a foundation from which our marketing team and creative agency partners could develop a truer, more emotionally resonant positioning”.
/ Lara Meyer – Former Head of Research & Insights at Hive