Our Client: James Dawson
A global developer and manufacturer of high performance silicone and organic rubber hoses for a range of markets and brands including Caterpillar, JCB and Cummins.
Silicone and rubber hosing might not be a glamourous trade, but it’s certainly essential. Planes, trains, diggers and all manner of other machines have a lot going on beneath the surface, and hoses are integral to ensuring everything runs “just so”. All this considered, James Dawson still had a considerable challenge before them when it came to their marketing strategy. How can we make something as practical and essential as rubber hosing look striking and appealing to the market?
They needed imagery that not only looked good, but effectively communicated the product’s high quality and diversity, as well as highlighting its practical applications. James Dawson is certainly not the only company to face the challenge of marketing a simple, necessary product in an exciting new way that gets attention.
How Great Branding Can Enhance a “Not-So-Glamorous” Product
The University of Pennsylvania researched the phenomenon behind content that tends to be popular to the extent that it “goes viral”, in the articulate terms of today’s social media. They found content gains the most attention when it falls into at least one of the following categories: surprising, positive, emotional or awe-inspiring. If a member of the target audience feels any one of these reactions when viewing content, chances are they’ll be more engaged and pass it on to someone else. In this way, creating compelling branding through imagery can differentiate a relatively simple product in a competitive market.
Let Your Branding Tell a New Story
If you know your target audience, but also know that the ‘show and tell’ nature of your branding is fast becoming fatigued, telling a new story about your product can refresh and revitalize its image. Sometimes this means injecting a sense of humor or quirkiness into your materials, or presenting a stripped back yet informative picture of what your product makes possible. In other words, don’t focus on the toilet paper, focus on the happy family who uses it!
Our Solution
For James Dawson’s branding imagery, we harnessed the elements of surprise and awe by placing the hoses squarely inside the challenging, hostile environments they’re often needed for. We digitally manipulated the hoses to convey the extreme conditions or environments a machine using the product would usually be found in, be it extreme heat or cold, or even corrosiveness. Into this ‘hosing landscape’, we then inserted images of the powerful machines they were usually only a small part of, essentially bringing the product to center-stage and making it appear larger than life. Using a mix of sleek photography, striking colours, textures and shapes we were able to create attention-grabbing imagery that drew the reader in.
By having the hosing products almost dwarf the machines they were used for, we created elements of surprise and awe, as well as communicating the diversity of their use. Our client was very happy with the final product, with James Dawson’s sales and marketing director reporting that the branding made all the difference when it came to getting a new project off the ground. By creating a flexible and bold new identity for a humble yet essential product, the look and feel we created can now be applied to a wide range of future product brochures or marketing materials for the brand.
If you’d like to find out how we can transform your business branding and get you noticed in a crowd, talk to us.
