The challenge
Baxi is a manufacturer and distributor of innovative heating and hot water solutions, serving a wide customer base, from social housing specifiers and contractors to one-off installers.
The Baxi brand has a long and impressive heritage, having seen significant growth across a number of European markets through the 50s, 60s and 70s. However, its strong level of customer brand awareness was driven predominantly by an older generation of customers.
Having struggled to clearly define its brand proposition in recent decades, Baxi found there was a lack of current brand understanding, with installers (and consequently customers) switching to competitor brands with better marketing support.
The garden solution
Baxi turned to Connect Advertising & Marketing to help boost brand awareness, selecting the agency because of its strategic insight and understanding of the sector (Connect having worked with brands including Tarmac and Calor).
The platform chosen to springboard awareness of Baxi in the current B2B market was Ecobuild 2013, the world’s biggest event for sustainable design, construction and the built environment.
Attended by more than 55,000 design and construction professionals (designers, specifiers, local authorities, house builders/developers, energy management teams, SAP assessors and self-builders), the show would put Baxi at the heart of today’s installer market.
Connect saw Ecobuild as an opportunity to help Baxi stand out from the crowd. Surveys of previous trade events (both Ecobuild and similar shows) revealed brands tend to opt for stands with an overly corporate look and feel, creating a sense of sameness.
Connect’s strategy was to create a stand that not only turned heads but also really appealed to visitors, attracting them to come in, sit down and relax while assessing and trying out Baxi’s products.
The Connect creative team came up with an innovative ‘garden’ concept to reflect its green credentials, featuring lots of natural material, an undulating slope and benches where visitors can sit. The stand was built with real attention to detail, featuring rock gardens, trees with hanging signs showing key facts about the brand, and even a hedge with Baxi’s name sculpted into it.
Crafted seating areas offered an inviting central area where visitors could explore the world of Baxi and chat to the brand’s experts. Baxi’s products were presented in see-through panels, allowing product managers to demonstrate and highlight key features.
Results
Feedback on the show stand was overwhelmingly positive and generated several thousand new business leads for Baxi, resulting in a 121 per cent increase compared with 2012.
These included:
- Sales appointments
- Literature requests
- People interested in signing up for Baxi’s installer loyalty scheme, Works
- Installers requesting training
- Product interest
As well as congratulatory Twitter feedback such as:
Andrea Price, head of marketing at Baxi, comments: “At Ecobuild this year we showcased our most sustainable energy solutions, including the Baxi Ecogen dual energy system and our Solarflo solar thermal water heating system. We wanted the stand to really reflect the green credentials of our products and felt that the park theme captured this perfectly.
“It was a really eye-catching creation and we couldn’t have been happier with the opportunity it gave us to showcase our products to their full potential. We are even planning to re-erect the show stand at one of the key Baxi training facilities, for the benefits of new installers and trainers.”
