Summary
Castrol Industrial’s ‘Technology inside’ campaign shows how excellent creative work can incorporate robust fact-based claims to make communications that are as persuasive as they are striking. The work demonstrates that good creative ideas work across all marketing channels with equal power, including both internal and external comms, to produce an integrated campaign that maximises impact and engagement. The ‘Technology inside’ campaign proves that B2B marketing in an industrial setting can be exciting and innovative and that robust engineering facts can be compelling and visually stimulating, and don’t have to be presented in a dry, dusty way. The ‘Inside’ idea not only integrates media and comms but glues together all of Castrol Industrial’s vast number of sectors, products and services to unify the business and simplify it for customers.
About the client company
Part of BP, Castrol Industrial is a global enterprise that makes the lubricants that literally oil the wheels of industry. Its products are used across the world in a diverse range of sectors including car manufacturing, food production, and wind energy. Castrol Industrial products cover such things as metalworking fluids, cleaners, corrosion preventives and lubricants that are engineered to keep machinery performing at its best. The products are backed up with technical expertise and management. Castrol Industrial has a range of thousands of products and some of these are highly specialist, being designed for a specific piece of machinery in a specific factory.
Strategy – broader issues the company is facing
Competition is fierce in the industrial world and the worldwide recession had affected many of the manufacturing industries that Castrol Industrial supplies. In any economic downturn the temptation to compete on price is increased and companies heighten their sensitivity to price and value.
Castrol Industrial does not compete on price but takes a premium positioning and concentrates on conveying the total cost of ownership savings provided by its products. It focuses on driving innovation in products and analyses and at being at the forefront of technological advancement.
Castrol Industrial prides itself on providing better service than its competitors. The company had recently been through a product rationalisation and wanted to focus on high performing products that delivered clear benefits and superior performance.
Objectives of the campaign
The campaign needed to:
- Reignite the Castrol Industrial business
- Make Castrol Industrial stand-out from competitors
- Convey that Castrol Industrial is innovative, advanced and premium
- Communicate high performance messages for key products
- Support products, people and services
- Cover all aspects of marketing and communications
- Make Castrol Industrial’s staff feel proud and motivated
Target Audience
The target audience is decision makers in the industrial world, all over the world. These are a mix of technical specialists and management decision makers. The technical specialists will be experts within their field and we need to persuade them that choosing Castrol Industrial products is best for their business. Management decision makers will not understand the technical intricacies but need to feel confident that their business has the right products in place. Both sets of people are interested in products and services that extend machine life and service intervals, reduce maintenance costs and maximise performance.
They are not people who will be influenced by marketing fluff and we needed to ensure we delivered robust and credible messages in an exciting and impactful way.
Media, channels or techniques used
For Castrol Industrial’s campaign we wanted an overall creative idea that would inspire and pull all aspects of the business together. We wanted to communicate that Castrol Industrial has the world’s most innovative range of high performance industrial lubricants and the most skilled and capable sales force. We wanted to position them as the leader in markets across the world. The idea we’re created was Inside: The innovation inside; the knowledge inside; the energy inside; the value inside; the technology inside
We communicated that Castrol Industrial is at the heart of industrial businesses around the world, which allowed us to talk about staff and sales as easily as heavy machinery. We created highly impactful and distinctive x-ray imagery to bring the ‘Technology inside’ concept to life.
As a purely B2B business Castrol Industrial’s marketing and comms focus on one-to-one conversations and industry events far more than ATL campaigns, though some specialist industry press is used. Wind Energy is an important business sector for Castrol Industrial and the initial creative roll-out focused on Wind. The idea was used on a brochure for key product Optigear Synthetic X 320. The idea enabled us to present hard, independently-tested facts with visual impact. Stunning posters excited the internal audience and the idea was used for the launch event, industry conferences and all sales presenters etc.
Since the Wind Energy launch the idea has been used for other parts of Castrol Industrial with equal success to give a coherent, integrated creative and strategic approach across the business
Timescales
Bray Leino pitched for the business in November 2009. The Technology Inside creative idea was launched internally and externally in August 2010 and all marketing material since has used the idea
Client Testimonial
“Bray Leino’s approach is sensational. They integrate with our ‘one team’ approach perfectly. This is demonstrated when filming with our customers, at big a launch events or just delivering concise sales tools or marketing materials. The new brand line of technology Inside and their x-ray imagery has truly differentiated us from our rivals.
It looks visually stunning and allows us to present persuasive, robust information in an interesting, compelling way. It works across all of our communication and marketing material to give Castrol Industrial a real feeling of integration and cohesion. The creative work itself has energised the business and customers alike.”
Stuart Newland, Offer Development Manager
