The brief
How can we inspire more people to borrow a boat? That was the big question.
For years, boating holidays have been perceived as something that’s reserved for the rich, retired and highly skilled. We teamed up with Borrow a Boat to help them open up the world of boating to people who’ve never done it before.
To achieve this, we set out to shift people’s perception with stories that revealed the magic of boating and inspired a new audience to ‘give it a try’.
The stories we dug up
We identified three target audiences, then ran a series of focus groups and interviews to understand their feelings towards boating holidays and what they looked for when searching for new adventures. For the experienced charterers, we focused on finding out what all the fuss was about.
This research surfaced a bunch of untold stories that led us to a compelling conclusion: boating changes the way people see the world. This simple piece of insight became the crux of our campaign.
The idea
The idea was simple – surface all the magical moments that happen when you Borrow a Boat.
This direction enabled us to create highly targeted messaging for each audience and enhance brand awareness by using ‘Borrow a Boat’ in the core storyline.
We identified three story categories from the research: secret places, unpredictable moments and epic emotions. These became springboards for the creative and enabled us to focus on specific stories we wanted to take to the world.
What we did
Part of our goal was to create a visual style that was ownable and shareable, so we explored masses of photography and pulled out the ones that would make people want to jump in. A bit like that scene in Mary Poppins.
We paired stunning photos with bold and punchy headlines to create a fresh-looking campaign that ran across multiple social channels, as well as travel print and press.
