Holt Lloyd International

How to take a brand beyond sponsorship

Celox Rapid How to take a brand beyond sponsorship

We’re firm believers that life’s all about balance. For every hour we spend slogging it out at the gym, we need to indulge in those things that help us relax, unwind and enjoy life. And, for thousands of car enthusiasts, the British Rally Championship is right up there. We saw a unique opportunity for our friends at Holt Lloyd International to leverage their Prestone brand, while helping spectators to have an awesome experience in the process.

Listen

Despite sup­ply­ing car care prod­ucts to the glob­al auto­mo­tive mar­ket for almost a cen­tu­ry, Holt Lloyd International’s Pre­stone brand had a low pro­file in the UK.

Fight­ing for shelf space in an already over­crowd­ed sec­tor, Holts knew it need­ed some­thing big to make its range of coolants and screen wash stand out from com­peti­tors.

Spon­sor­ship of the MSA British Ral­ly Cham­pi­onship seemed like the per­fect fit. As one of the largest spec­ta­tor sports in the UK, the com­pe­ti­tion is syn­ony­mous with speed, per­for­mance and con­di­tions that test dri­vers to the extremes.

The prob­lem? The spon­sor­ship deal had been done, but how were they going to acti­vate it? They asked us to help them make Pre­stone the must-have car care brand for the British motorist.

Plan

Our task was to cre­ate a buzz about the brand and dri­ve spec­ta­tor engage­ment at each of the sev­en stages of the com­pe­ti­tion in Scot­land, Eng­land, Wales, North­ern Ire­land, Bel­gium and the final in The Isle of Man.

We began with brand­ing, cre­at­ing a dynam­ic logo lock-up that gave the Pre­stone and BRC part­ner­ship an iden­ti­ty of its own. This was used across all mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als and print­ed on give­aways to increase vis­i­bil­i­ty on race days.

The new logo appeared on gaze­bos, ban­ners, flags, race vehi­cles, cloth­ing, caps and rain pon­chos, which were wel­comed by spec­ta­tors in inclement weath­er dur­ing the first leg of the series in the Scot­tish bor­ders.

To fur­ther involve motor­sport fans, we set up a full-size ral­ly game sim­u­la­tor at each event, where spec­ta­tors could test their dri­ving skills on a vir­tu­al track. The fastest dri­vers won a day at a ral­ly dri­ving school, with a VIP expe­ri­ence at Ral­ly GB for the over­all win­ner at the end of the cham­pi­onship.

As well as cre­at­ing extra excite­ment on the day, the gam­i­fi­ca­tion proved to be excel­lent for data cap­ture, work­ing in tan­dem with the Pre­stone microsite which is home to race infor­ma­tion, leader­boards and dri­ver pro­file videos. We also pro­duced con­sumer ads to appear in the race pro­gramme dis­trib­uted at events.

Final­ly, the new joint brand­ing appeared on 5‑, 10- and 15-sec­ond break bumpers at the start, mid­dle and end of The British Ral­ly Cham­pi­onship High­lights on Chan­nel 4 and BT Sport, ensur­ing Pre­stone was seen by an even wider audience.

Deliver

At the end of Round 1, we had already start­ed to see the impact of this brand acti­va­tion pro­gramme.

Dur­ing Feb­ru­ary and March 2018, BRC social accounts reached over 39 mil­lion peo­ple, with Prestone’s tar­get­ed con­tent reach­ing 132,000 fans. The new, dual-brand­ed MSABRC web­site has had 119,493 unique users since the start of the year with 18,000 video views.

News­pa­per and online reach totalled 11,877,557 and our cov­er­age in local press was seen by almost 8 mil­lion read­ers. At the events, we gave away 1000 bot­tles of screen wash, 650 bot­tles of coolant, 1000 brand­ed caps and 500 pon­chos, mak­ing the Pre­stone brand vis­i­ble to thou­sands more.

By the end of the series, Holt Lloyd Inter­na­tion­al met their tar­get of increas­ing brand aware­ness by 4%.

Product stand deliver panel

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