Cynical, experienced, and suspicious of digital
A case study in changing entrenched opinions
Picture the scene.
You’re working on the plant floor of a chemical factory. You can hear the hum of machines. You’re responsible for keeping every piston, every lever, every furnace running. If something fails, and stays offline for just an hour, it will cost millions of dollars. And right now, you’ve got three alarms sounding in different places.
What’s your priority? Innovation? Digital transformation? Learning to read ten new data dashboards? No.
This is the audience ABB needed to convince to try its innovative digital solution– asset performance management. Here’s how we approached the challenge – and some takeaways you could apply in similar situations.
The brief
Asset performance management (APM) was ABB’s best-kept secret.
Our client had a strong solution, which drew on the biggest industrial dataset in the world. But they weren’t getting much traction with potential customers.
We needed to work out why. And change it.
Takeaway
Don’t shy away from the problem. Frame it as clearly as possible.
The audience
Sure, we could have talked to the C-Suite about digital benefits and transformation. But the C-Suite was already keen on transformation and it still wasn’t happening.
We realised that the key to fundamental change wasn’t the person signing off on the decision. It was the influencers – the managers on the plant floor – who had to implement and use the technology.
The challenge? These people really didn’t think much of digital. They’d spent a decade being told that they should ‘transform’ and tackling the fallout from top-down decisions on technology.
So, we decided to target sceptical managers. But only managers who’d already used some ABB technology in their plant. ABB had a strong reputation with these people.
Takeaway
If you’re targeting a sceptical audience, avoid an uphill battle by starting with your existing customers.
The revelation
Sometimes, you need to look at things from a whole new angle. That’s what we did with this campaign.
Our audience thought data-driven solutions were an alternative to their expertise. They saw digital systems as hard to understand, slow to learn, and not sufficiently grounded in the real world of the plant floor.
We needed to show that data is not the opposite of experience. We needed to show that data is experience.
Takeaway
Never ignore a perception problem – address it head-on.
The creative
We realised something crazy.
Every data point is a story. And not just any story. For an audience of people who’ve worked on the plant floor for decades, data points were real experiences in their life. A day when the fan broke and caused chaos. A day when they caught an asset just in time, before it failed.
This changed everything.
Instead of selling a digital product, we’d create a ‘thank you’ campaign. Because this wasn’t just any APM. This was an APM built on the biggest industrial dataset in the world. It was an APM built on our audience’s vast experience.
Along the way, we could tell small stories from the lives of plant managers. Highlighting real incidents that shaped who they are. Incidents they solved, and that we can all now learn from.
Takeaway
Lots of great creative ideas come from reframing: here, we reframed data points as stories.
The results
This courageous client ran bold creative – and it paid off. The campaign generated:
- 1 million media impressions
- 6 million LinkedIn impressions
- 500K+ video views
- 7000+ clicks to landing page
- A CPC 45% lower than target
The hero video is used consistently by sales and technical teams to open conversations and wow people at events.
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