Absolute deliver a global marketing plan in China

The scope of the plan has encompassed, branding review and development, website redesign and build, digital and social marketing initiatives and the filming of a promotional video at Dorney Lakes, the venue for the 2012 Olympics, as well as a wide range of printed collateral, creative advertising and product branding. At the beginning of December we were very pleased to be invited to China to present our work to a gathering of the company’s owners and over 40 international distributors and engineers, from 12 countries.

The week kicked off meeting key stakeholders and hearing incredible stories from them. We especially enjoyed hearing about boat design history, spanning decades, from the world’s top boat designer, Klaus Filter. We came away after the first few days with a deeper understanding of the history of the brand, and the passion of all those involved. We were able to use this knowledge to inform the presentation of the plan.

We spent the week getting a sense of how the boats are manufactured by touring the factory, gaining a complete understanding of the whole production process, seeing master craftsmen at work and the latest technological advances in machinery being used. What also resonated was the huge investment made into the environmentally friendly aspects of the production system, such as air and water filtration and a massive reliance on solar power.

During our time there we needed to direct some photography covering the racing boats with the new branding applied and video of the manufacturing processes. We set up a corner of the factory as a photography studio, had a wall painted to serve as a background, and a custom set of boat hangers fabricated to hold the boats firmly in place. The decals were applied to the boats, and we had a round of feedback from the distributors, to understand further considerations from a production standpoint. Once iterated and finalised, we shot the boats at 15° intervals and these will be used to animate the boats, on the product detail page within the website, giving us more possibilities to creatively showcase the product in an immersive way.

Final thoughts…

What a fantastic client to recognise the value in our expertise and be able to invite us over to China for such an informative experience. Being there with the photographer, on site, allowed us to get the product photography right first time and understand the products to a much greater degree and the scale of the manufacturing resource on a global level.

Read our WinTech Racing case study.