American Standard Brands needed a breakout strategy to launch a new luxury plumbing brand called DXV.
Luxury plumbing products is an extremely competitive field, with many boutique brands competing for display space in the specialty decorative plumbing showrooms that cater to professional designers.
To successfully launch a new luxury plumbing brand, the company not only needed to build brand awareness, but also build trust within the interior design community that DXV would excel at meeting their needs.
For showroom owners and managers, the company needed to demonstrate that it could create demand with all the sexy buzz of the boutique brands.
O’Reilly DePalma developed a campaign targeting the interior design industry that relied exclusively on social media for the initial launch
Audience targets:
- Socially-connected kitchen and bath designers, remodelers and their followers.
Objectives:
Partnered with Modenus Media to engage six practicing designers across the US and Canada as the inaugural DXV Design Panel, below with the then-American Standard CEO.
Created compelling content by providing a budget for each designer to create bathrooms and one kitchen space using DXV products. The designs were built into sets, photographed and featured on DXV.com when the site launched. Costs were minimized and reach expanded by partnering with non-competing brands to build the sets. Photography was used for multiple purposes, including PR and advertising.
To maximize social media interest, Modenus launched the tantalizing #topsecret hashtag for the panelists to use while supervising the set construction, styling and photography of their designs.
We orchestrated the big reveal by the Design Panel online targeted to the peak hours of social engagement for designers. The brand and agencies amplified their messages, but we let the designers “launch” the brand to their communities.
Challenges: Leading with social media carried some risks related to the exclusivity requirements of the traditional media. Our solution was to identify specific angles to the launch that we reserved as exclusives for public relations. (Read the related PR case study.)
Results:
- Generated 2.7 million social impressions from 524 social and blog posts in the first 72 hours of the DXV “big reveal.” Within the first 15 days of launch, we generated more than 7 million social impressions from 1,293 social and blog posts.
- The social launch attracted the most monthly visits to the website than in succeeding months from online, B2B advertising and PR:
- The launch was a win/win for the brand and the design panelists, who were not compensated for their efforts. One designer said doubled her average daily social reach in the first 24 hours. Another panelist called the launch “the best week of my career” and even five months later, his blog post about his DXV bathroom remained his most popular blog post. A third panelist got Dwell.com to feature her kitchen space as an online slide show. A fourth panelist won “Best of Class – Large Bath” for her DXV space in a DC-area design competition.
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