Creating Gold. After a detailed observational study of the UK teenage market, we moved all the brand’s marketing budget online. The resulting campaign, produced in association with the social network Bebo, achieved results beyond our wildest dreams.
BRIEF
The golddigga brand is the successful creation of a street-trading fashion entrepreneur from Derby. Recently purchased as a private equity investment, golddigga is an edgy, urban, mass market offering with a mid-price positioning, and in the UK is targeted at girls aged from 13 to over 20.
The takeover meant company restructuring, new energy and a more focused brand proposition, taking the golddigga message to completely new levels of consumer awareness.
The challenges were to find powerful and motivating ways of delivering the brand proposition building on what had already been achieved, and to reach a target audience which can be very difficult to motivate.
Golddigga was already seen as a brand with ‘attitude’; the question was where, when and how could we make this attitude count.
SOLUTION
After a programme of observation and behavioural research, t7F recognised that golddigga consumers were focused on fun in groups. It was apparent that there were major themes in their lives which could provide useful leverage for the brand: friendship, transport, cool jobs and self-expression.
The fundamental insight was that golddigga could own the anticipation of going out and having fun with friends. The target became friendship groups aged from 14 to 18.
Changes have swept through European youth and the ways of reaching them have had to change too. The readership of teenage girls’ lifestyle magazines is in sharp decline, whilst teenage media consumption is growing sharply. Teenagers spend more time consuming media than they sleep, so they aren’t necessarily hard to reach, but it can be hard to get their attention and earn their respect.
You need to go where they go, be part of what they’re part of, talk to them in the way they talk to each other. And you always have to remember that you’re a guest in their attention space. Bore them and you get blown away; get it right and they’ll even actively market your brand for you.
We created a major online communications campaign at the centre of which was Bebo, the UK’s most powerful & influential social networking site. It’s visited by over 2 million females aged 15 to 24 every month during which, on average, they’re online with Bebo for over 1000 minutes.
Our campaign included a broad range of message formats: homepage takeovers, brand profiling, editorial spotlights, MPUs and thumbnails. It also included a major sponsorship and product integration package with Bebo’s big new online video soap opera – Sofia’s Diary.
Alongside online activity, we also planned a major offline experiential package, at the centre of which was a pink, brand-skinned and modded Audi Q7 prepared by the same team that brings you MTV’s ‘Pimp My Ride’. This toured the UK visiting teenage and underage music events, and retail outlets with promotional teams giving out brand collateral.
RESULT
Did it work? Yes, beyond even our wildest expectation.
In just the first three months of going live, the campaign on Bebo directly delivered almost 30 million branded impacts to girls aged 13 to 24. 5000 people asked to become a friend of golddigga.
The brand profile was viewed by almost 90,000 people, and golddigga branded skins were downloaded to over 23,000 personal profiles delivering at the very least 1.1 million personally endorsed brand messages to their friends.
Perhaps most importantly, the phone started to ring. Calls came from major fashion retail chains like Republic who’d seen the activity and were now asking once again for meetings.
Golddigga men’s range
Using observational research and trend prediction methods we designed a series of sub brands for Golddigga. We were thrilled that two of these made it through into sample stage – a sports range for teenage girls and a men’s range for the upper teens.
