The project required us to understand the brand and the business as well as the goals of the business unit heads and the company’s sustainability positioning. As we were undertaking a B2Me campaign, we also needed to understand the consumer mindset. using various methods of research, we homed in on who we were going to reach and how we were going to reach them, advising Lenzing on the appropriate marketing tools to address customers’ growing environmental awareness and preference for comfort. In the course of the project, we studied a number of leading ingredient brands[RP1] and benchmarked against them.
Base Creative helped refine and expand Lenzing’s new brand strategy and extended it to all the touchpoints required to successfully activate the redefined brand. Considerable effort was expended on working with different teams in Lenzing to define a set of claims for TENCEL™ fibers – verified as accurate and free of legal risk – which would serve as the foundation of all marketing materials. In addition to the fibers themselves, we helped Lenzing to name and define claims for several key technologies applied to the fibers to enhance desired characteristics such as softness and color fastness. The objective was to narrow TENCEL™ fibers down to the benefits that mattered to customers, cutting away distractions from the key message. In using these claims to copywrite all the subsequent collaterals, a key challenge for Base Creative was to create writing that balanced technical precision with broad customer appeal.
The TENCEL™ brand story, as developed, was one of natural comfort – fibers that appealed to eco-conscious consumers by combining superior environmental sustainability, through their botanic origin and eco-friendly production processes, with long-lasting softness, strength and versatility. This brand personality was extended into a number of branded offers for different market segments – TENCEL™ Denim, TENCEL™ Intimate, TENCEL™ Active, and TENCEL™ Home – and corresponding focused variants of the claims developed for each. An insight-driven overarching slogan, feels so right, was developed and variations of this produced for each branded offer – addressing emotional consumer needs to look good, feel good and do good.
With some visual elements predefined, Base Creative refined and extended the brand’s look and feel to develop a range of materials revolving around the brand story of nature and comfort. Ensuring cohesive key messages, active visual prototyping always ran parallel with strategic thought.
A brand grid incorporating Lenzing’s Thread of Life motif ensured continuity and cohesion, complemented by a green-based color scheme and appropriate fonts to reflect nature and gentleness, with a recurring forest theme and visual portrayals of how wood is turned into fibers and then to fabrics. With an uncluttered minimalist aesthetic and “everyday epic” photographic style to keep the focus on benefits of the brand, we produced a wide spectrum of marketing materials for the brand as a whole and for individual branded offers. To make sure this focus was never lost, we worked closely with TENCEL™ to align and distinguish the new direction with that of its parent brand, LENZING™. Icons were developed to symbolize key benefits and used across the entire range of marketing collaterals. Their use was later extended into the VEOCEL™ and LENZING™ Industrial projects to maintain alignment.
With the brand’s marketing claims and visual style determined, a major part of our work was to bring these together into a full range of marketing collaterals. On top of a claim book for Lenzing’s internal reference, our extensive output at this stage included brand guidelines for licensees, brochures and leaflets, videos, redesigned multilingual swing tags, a B2B brand toolkit summarizing key elements of the brand, a new TENCEL™ website, a trade show booth design system, and print advertising for both B2B and B2C. We expanded the original photo library with dedicated shoots, particularly for B2C marketing.
We made sure to cover all bases, using these marketing materials across numerous channels to help Lenzing express the TENCEL™ brand at every touchpoint, from digital marketing to trade shows to newly shot brand and segment videos and redesigned segment brochures to mass advertising. Instore POS materials were complemented by a retailer education program, while efforts were also made to reach key influencers such as trade and fashion columnists. The TENCEL™ website was optimized for both B2B and B2C customers. The “feels so right” campaign was first launched in Turkey and Japan through cobranding partnerships and key influencer engagement, and further cobranding partnerships are being developed. Results of all these activities were monitored via appropriate analytics.
Our efforts culminated in a high profile European launch event which we organized at Palais Brongniart in Paris in February 2018. Featuring a fashion/dance show and supermodel Arizona Muse, this well-received production was attended by key Lenzing customers and trade media, bringing the redefined brand to the attention of market leaders.